The Sixth Borough Subway

When I was in college I used to walk over to Riverside Park, or down to the built-but-as-far-as-I-know-never-used ferry docks at 125th Street and enjoy the view across the Hudson River to New Jersey.  Until the new store on 72nd Street opened, Google Maps would taunt me by telling me about how the Trader Joe’s (yeah, yeah) in Edgewater was the closest geographically to my dorm on 120th between Amsterdam and Morningside Drive. And yet, I didn’t make it over there a single time during college. Why? Because the Hudson River is a pretty damn formidable barrier to decent transit that could integrate northern New Jersey more fully into New York City.

And that’s a shame, because northern New Jersey, and especially Hudson and Bergen counties, is getting increasing attention as one of NYC’s numerous proposed Sixth Boroughs. There’s a reason for that; it’s close (at least as the crow flies), more affordable than most of the city (with certain exceptions), and, like NYC, an extreme outlier from the national norm in terms of density. According to Wikipedia, Hudson County’s overall population density (including uninhabited areas) checks in at 13,495/sq mile, and Union City and tiny little Guttenberg have claims to be among the densest places in the entire country.

Wikipedia’s table of densities in individual Hudson County municipalities. 

Bergen County is considerably less dense, but still has significant high-rise development, and other high-density built environments, clustered along the river.

Existing transportation options into New York City are limited. Southern Hudson County has decent access to PATH trains, and buses run into the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the George Washington Bridge bus terminal. PABT-bound buses enjoy use of the Exclusive Bus Lane in the morning but not for the return, a rather intolerable situation. Within New Jersey, the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail provides north-south travel, but its routing is kind of loopy. More north-south riders use the very frequent combination of jitneys and NJT buses along Bergenline Avenue. As such, Alon Levy has proposed that Bergenline should eventually get a subway, perhaps in combination with a new regional rail station on the Gateway project or the existing Hudson tunnels.

All that is well and good. But–and to be clear, this is purely me indulging my crayonista side on a lazy Sunday–if New Jersey is going to be the 6th Borough, it needs a subway system, right? After all, even Staten Island–less dense than Hudson County–has a semi-subway (well, it runs subway cars). That ties in with a question that Tod Newcombe asked in Governing magazine just about exactly three years ago, and that Daniel Hertz tweeted out semi-recently: when will the US build its next subway? The article is a little out of date–construction on Los Angeles’ Subway to the Sea, probably the single strongest subway project remaining in the entire country, is now underway–but it’s still an interesting and provocative question. So my answer is: why not the “Sixth Borough”?

So here’s my suggestion.

I also recommend looking at the PDF version: sixth borough subways final .

I drew the new lines in Google My Maps before importing them to GIS, and you can view them here:

The system is built around the Bergenline Subway, which connects along its length with several extensions of the existing NYC subway system, as well as HBLR and PATH. We’ll run through each line in some kind of order.

Bergenline Subway

I’ve broken the full-length Bergenline subway into three sections.

Phase I is from Journal Square in Jersey City–a key transfer to PATH–north to Fairview, where the line would connect with an extension of the city system coming across from 125th Street. I’ve placed the line under JFK Boulevard and Summit Avenue south of the Union City transfer to the Midtown line, but it could just as easily be under Bergenline proper (for part of the distance at least) or Central Avenue.

Phase 2 is from Fairview north to Fort Lee at the foot of the George Washington Bridge, and a connection with the decades-overdue (due to no one really caring) extension of the C train across the bridge.

Phase 3 extends the line south from Journal Square through some dense areas of Jersey City to a transfer with the HBLR near Liberty State Park (once upon a time, a railroad terminal). Phase 3 could take a slightly different routing; there seems to be one available just to the east along railroad ROW that would presumably be much cheaper, but isn’t as close to some residential neighborhoods.

C to Fort Lee

It’s semi-common knowledge in railfan and transit circles that the George Washington Bridge was originally supposed to carry trains on the lower deck, and that provision exists within the subway system for the C train to be extended across it.

From nycsubway.org’s track maps. The C currently terminates at 168th St. and turns in 174th St. Yard; as is clear from the map, the two easternmost yard tracks have potential to turn into through tracks onto the GWB.

Given that two subway tracks can carry far more volume than two road lanes, it’s well past time to retrofit the bridge, but there are no plans on the horizon (God Forbid planning focus on moving people rather than cars!). My plan assumes that the line will be a short stub terminating in Fort Lee, where it would meet the northern end of the Bergenline line:

It could, however, (and eventually should) go further west, as Alon points out.

@sandypsj @vanshnook (If there's one big criticism I have of your map, it's that lines should be going farther west – C on Route 4, etc.)

— alon_levy (@alon_levy) January 24, 2016

The obvious target for a rapid transit extension from Fort Lee would be Paterson, which can be reached via I-80 and is dense and poor.

125th to Edgewater

This is the one that would have been useful to college-student Sandy. Yonah Freemark and others have made the case that when (if?) Phase II of the Second Avenue Subway is completed to 125th Street, the logical next step is to turn it west along 125th rather than continuing north to the Bronx, since funding for the huge network originally intended to sprout from the new trunk is unlikely to be forthcoming. As such, I’ve colored this line teal to correspond to future SAS services. But why stop there? 125th Street lines up relatively nicely with the abandoned NYS&W tunnel under the Palisades to Edgewater. The tunnel would need to be fundamentally rebuilt for subway service (it doesn’t seem large enough for double track, for example) but it’s better than having no starting point at all. In my scenario, there would be the further incentive of a north-south Bergenline subway to interchange with. And once you’re under the Palisades, it would be easy to extend to a massive Park’n’Ride (yes, I’m for them under some circumstances) at the Vince Lombardi rest stop.

Theoretically, the line could also be extended east across the Hell Gate to LaGuardia.

59th Street-Weehawken Line

The BMT line under 59th Street in Manhattan lines up almost perfectly with the Weehawken Tunnel, a former steam railroad facility now used by HBLR. In this vision, the tunnel would be converted to subway use, with HBLR ending at a transfer point at Port Imperial. A branch off of the BMT could make a quick stop at a new lowest level of Columbus Circle before heading under the Hudson to an interchange with the Bergenline line and then a terminus at Tonnelle Avenue. Really, this branch could come off of any of the numerous subway lines in the area just south of Central Park, but the  59th Street line should have extra capacity with the Q shifting over to SAS in a few years.

7 to Hoboken

Sending the 7 train to Secaucus to meet commuter rail passengers has been a hot topic of discussion for a few years. It’s not really that great an idea, but here’s a different (which, full disclosure, I’m not sure is any better): send the 7 down to Hoboken. The tail tracks already extend to 26th Street, so there’s a little less tunneling to do. The new branch could make a stop or two in the lower part of Hoboken before terminating at Hoboken Terminal, or–since the IRT and PATH loading gauges are thisclose–someone could figure out a way to continue service onto existing PATH tracks and create a Flushing-Newark service. (I’d pay money to read a profile of someone who would ride that whole line)

A 7 extension would be somewhat redundant with PATH’s existing 33rd Street branch, but they do serve different areas of Midtown, and the 7 is probably better for most people, since it would open up part of the East Side.

L to Secaucus

Alon offered a tepid evaluation of this route in his post on the 7, but, while low-priority (like, honestly, most of what’s proposed here), it seems to make more sense than the 7. I also think the presence of a Bergenline subway makes either extension more attractive in this scenario. The extension would traverse some fairly dense areas of Hoboken and offer a transfer to the Bergenline subway (and possibly also to the 7 near the campus of Stevens Institute of Technology) before ending at Secaucus Transfer; it could, theoretically, be extended across the Meadowlands on an existing ROW through Kearny into northern Newark. Alon suggested on Twitter combining the 7 and L alignments through Hoboken. That’s potentially doable but would require either four tracks or some fancy work with platform edges, since the loading gauges don’t match.

Conclusion

This is all, of course, extremely speculative, and while obviously I’d love to see it happen in a fantasy world–and I think it would be excellent for both New York and New Jersey to have the Palisades towns better incorporated into NYC’s transit sphere–I don’t expect much if any of this to come about. The Bergenline subway from Journal Square to Fort Lee, and the C extension across the GWB, is almost certainly the strongest part of this vision. The areas along the Palisades are already dense enough to support high-order, expensive transit, and the C extension would offer a capacity upgrade over the existing all-road format on the GWB.

The other trans-Hudson crossings would likely be beneficial, but the need for them could be ameliorated somewhat by better incorporation of PATH into the NYC network. I’m particularly fond of the 59th Street and 125th Street plans and more lukewarm on the 7 and L personally, but hey, this is about vision and dreaming. And that’s something that I think many of us feel is sorely lacking in the NYC-area planning world at this moment.

New Haven Line Penn Station Access, Faster and Cheaper

The topic of bringing trains from Metro-North’s into Penn Station on the West Side of Manhattan has been the subject of endless studies and public attention for the past 15 years or more.

Penn Station Access studies, 2002, including Hudson, Harlem, and New Haven Lines

Over the years, the expensive option of Hudson Line Access, which would involve an extensive rebuilding of the current, done-on-the-cheap Empire Connection, has been pushed off into the hard-to-envision future. Current plans revolve around the less capital-intensive option of bringing New Haven Line trains into Penn Station via the Hell Gate Bridge and the East River Tunnels. The idea garnered particular attention when it was included in the 2015-2019 MTA Capital Program,  then singled out–in distinct contrast to the rest of the MTA’s capital needs–by the Cuomo administration in the executive draft of the 2016-2016 state budget, funding $250 million of the projected $1 billion cost.

And therein lies the rub. There is, reasonably speaking, no real reason New Haven Line Penn Station Access (hereforth referred to as just PSA) should cost anything close to $1 billion. Though details are sketchy, the project as currently conceived appears to involve essentially the construction of four stations in the Bronx, a short extension of third rail in Queens to close a gap where Metro-North’s M8 EMUs can’t operate…and that’s it.

2014 proposed PSA alignment, with stations

Documentation in the initial 2015-2019 MTA Capital Program suggests that the budgeted cost for PSA was $743 million, still incomprehensibly high, but somehow also $250 million below the number included in publicity this year:

The Capital Program budgets $188 million for the four stations in the Bronx–close to in line with the $41.3 million construction cost for West Haven, the most recent New Haven Line infill station. But that’s only the second-largest section of expenditures. The program also forecasts, very confusingly, $264 million for “track and structures.” That’s confusing because the whole point of Penn Station Access is that literally no track work is required, as Amtrak trains demonstrate every day. Alon has made the case for grade-separating Shell Interlocking, where the Hell Gate Line splits off from the Metro-North tracks to Grand Central, and that should definitely be done, but there’s no indication that that’s where the $264 million is going here. Perhaps some of it is going to the planned reconstruction of Herald interlocking in Sunnyside Yard, but that’s far more necessary for East Side Access than PSA. Perhaps some of ESA’s spiraling costs are being shifted onto PSA?

The other potential scenario is that Amtrak is demanding MTA restore some additional tracks onto the Hell Gate Line. The line has a four-track right-of-way that currently carries only two passenger tracks, with stretches of a non-electrified third track for (very limited) freight service. Amtrak hasn’t exactly been an easy partner with regard to East Side Access, so there’s no reason to assume they’d make the MTA’s life easy when it comes to PSA either. In any case, unless massive levels of service are planned for PSA, there’s no reason to add more tracks to the Hell Gate Line–the existing two tracks are plenty to handle Amtrak traffic plus a few additional Metro-North trains. But the point is the public doesn’t know where this significant expenditure is going. Maybe it’s actually being spent well. Maybe there are real needs I and other transit bloggers am not aware of. Or maybe not. In the meantime, it certainly looks bad.

Speaking of service: one of the other incomprehensible things about PSA has been the vocal insistence from MTA and the Cuomo administration that service cannot begin until some many LIRR trains are diverted to Grand Central by the opening of East Side Access. Presumably, this is their way of heading off conflicts with Long Island legislators who have previously gone to war to preserve parochial geographic privileges within the limited platform slots available at Penn Station, but it’s not, well, strictly necessary.

It has become very common and fashionable for transit advocates and bloggers to call for commuter trains to run through Penn Station rather than terminating there as a solution to the station’s growing capacity problems. With the very limited exception of the joint MNR/NJT Train to the Game Service, this has not yet happened, nor do the operating agencies show any apparent interest in making it happen, aside from vague references to through-running cooperation in dense documents.

Gratuitous YouTube break, demonstrating that New Jersey Transit trains can, in fact, run through to the New Haven Line

There are genuine technical reasons that through-running is hard. While NJT’s dual-mode and electric locomotives can operate throughout the corridor, the New Haven Line’s M8 EMUs cannot operate on the 12 kV/25 Hz electrification system installed on the Northeast Corridor between Gate interlocking (on the Queens side of the Hell Gate bridge) and Washington, DC.  There are a lot more of the EMUs, and they’re much preferable to loco-hauled trains, since they accelerate faster.

That being said, the gap between the end of 12.5 kV/60 Hz electrification at GATE and the beginning of LIRR’s 750 V DC, third rail electrification–which M8s can operate over–at Harold Interlocking is less than two miles. The third rail then extends through Penn Station to the west portal of the Hudson River tunnels. From there, it’s less than a five-mile gap of NEC-style electrification to Kearny Interlocking. There, NJT’s Morris & Essex Lines split off. Since 1984, they’ve been electrified at 25 kV/60Hz–a system under which the M8s can also run.

In other words, a perfect through-running partner for PSA service already exists on the Jersey side of the river–a line on which both NJT and Metro-North equipment can operate freely. The only technical barrier is the very manageable gaps in third-rail coverage.

Gaps in M8-friendly electrification highlighted in red.

From some Google Maps scouting, it appears that a total of about 16 track-miles of new third rail would be required, give or take some since I don’t know exactly where various electrification standards begin and end. Estimates as to the cost of new third rail vary, but $3 million per track-mile seems reasonable, perhaps even conservative. At $3 million per mile and 16 track-miles, you’d end up with a cost of right around $50 million for the needed third-rail extensions–very, very reasonable for the capacity improvement it represents.

So for just $50 million, we can run any New Haven Line train we want through to Gladstone, Dover, or Montclair State University. There are additional costs, of course. While all three M&E Lines terminal stations (in electrified territory) have high-level platforms, relatively few of the other stops do, and M8s have no traps for low-level platforms. I count a total of 58 platforms that would need to be high-leveled on all three branches. At a cost of $5 million per platform–again, conservative–that’s a further investment of $290 million. Most likely, you could knock off $90 million of that by not bothering with the ten stations of the very rural Gladstone Branch, and you could establish skeleton express service to Newark Broad Street, Summit and Dover on the Morristown Line and Bay Street and Montclair State on the Montclair-Boonton Line without any modifications at all. And, of course, existing NJT equipment can handle any and all platforms.

So where does that leave us? Costs for a barebones proof-of-concept run-through system could look something like this:

• $50 million for closing gaps in electrification
• $200 million for all four Bronx stations, politically the most important part of the project
• $200 million for high-level platforms on the Morristown and Montclair-Boonton Lines
• Presumably up to $100 million in various signal, yard modification, and other miscellaneous costs

For those counting at home, that’s about $550 million. For that money, you’d get:

• direct access from the Eastern Bronx to the West Side of Manhattan and job markets in New Jersey, including Newark
• a one-seat ride from eastern Westchester and Connecticut to Newark, and vice versa
• more efficient use of existing train slots at Penn Station–“free” capacity improvement that doesn’t detract from any other line’s service
• proof that running through Penn Station is both technically and politically feasible.

This vision of PSA and through-running at Penn Station might not be the highest priority we can dream about, but it is likely the most easily achievable. Given ESA’s ever-accumulating delays, PSA might not happen until 2025 if it has to wait for the other project. What I’m offering here may be barebones, but it offers the opportunity to make an innovative, somewhat important project happen far faster than otherwise planned.

Of course, this is the US, and more specifically the Tri-State region, so the real barriers aren’t technical but political and bureaucratic. With Albany and Trenton both mired in scandal, and a New York gubernatorial administration that for some reason seems determined to sandbag PSA, this kind of a scheme is unlikely to come to pass. Getting the various railroads involved here to work with each other is notoriously difficult, and given that Amtrak owns much of the infrastructure involved, heads would probably need to be knocked at the federal level (paging Senator Schumer…) The attitude from government so far has largely been to out-spend fundamental organizational problems (something that can be send of many, many aspects of transit in the NYC area), but let’s try for something better. In an era of fiscal constraint, low-investment, high-impact sure sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Berkshires Rail Service Still Not a Winner, or, the Importance of Interdependence and Cooperation

Last week, the state of Massachusetts announced the purchase of the Berkshire Line, running from Pittsfield south to the Connecticut border, from the freight-hauling Housatonic Railroad.  The hope is, apparently, to restore through passenger service from New York City to Pittsfield, which hasn’t existed on the line since the 1971, but was once considered a staple of the Berkshires resort economy. But is it a good idea?

In the official statement, on the deal, MassDOT Secretary and CEO Richard Davey claimed that ““Studies have shown that a Berkshire County rail connection to New York City would be a winner, with more than one million rides annually.” For some perspective, that’s over 2,700 rides a day, or 1,300+ in each direction. The NYC-Berkshires travel market was once fairly large, and remains somewhat so, but there’s certainly no guarantee  of any kind of mass return to transit in the corridor. In any case, the MassDOT purchase covers the line only from the Connecticut border to Pittsfield, leaving Massachusetts dependent on Connecticut’s willingness to invest in its segment of the line.

Indeed, even if rail transit returns to the Berkshires, the Housatonic line seems an unlikely candidate for that restoration; it is so poorly suited to through passenger traffic, in fact, that even the dedicated foamers over at railroad.net are very skeptical of the success of any restored passenger service. The entire line is so curvy that railfans estimate (see above link) that even with massive infrastructure investment trip times from NYC to Pittsfield would never get better than 4 hours–and even that seems optimistic. And the required investment would be massive–the line is single-track, completely unsignalled, and has been allowed to deteriorate to the very bare minimum necessary for freight service (and far too often less) over the years. Indeed, as early as the 1930s, New York-bound travelers abandoned what was then the New Haven Railroad’s Berkshires Division in favor of driving to New York Central’s parallel Harlem Line; today, that legacy continues as many Berkshires travelers take Metro-North to Wassaic (the current terminus of the now-truncated Harlem Line) and drive the remainder of the trip to their weekend or summer homes. Meanwhile, the middle portion, from New Milford to Canaan, CT, is so devoid of population that it was in fact entirely abandoned from 1972 until the Housatonic restored service in 1983.

In short, the idea that thousands of passengers a day will ride a slow train to the Berkshires via Danbury seems a little far-fetched to say the least; the train trip from Grand Central to Wassaic is about 2:15-2:30, and it’s another 45 minutes by car to Sheffield, 50 to Great Barrington, an hour to Stockbridge or Lee, 1:10 to Lenox, or 1:20 to Pittsfield, yielding trip times in the 3:15 range for the southern Berkshires and around 4 hours for Pittsfield. Driving all the way is faster, of course, depending on traffic around NYC itself. Restored Berkshire Division service seems unlikely to be able to match these times.

Luckily for advocates of smart infrastructure spending, it’s very clear that plans for through passenger service depend entirely on Connecticut’s willingness to spend money on its section of the line. That seems quite unlikely given the very few passengers who would be served; why should Connecticut spend money just to benefit NYC-Berkshires weekend commuters? In the meantime, Massachusetts paid relatively little for its section of the Berkshire Line, so waiting to see what happens with Connecticut’s portion doesn’t seem like such a raw deal. Advocates of NYC-Berkshires rail service, though, are probably left wanting more.

There is, however, another option. Traditionally, New York Central handled Berkshires traffic, as noted above, via the Harlem Line, with a connection to the Massachusetts-bound Boston & Albany division at Chatham, NY. With the abandonment of the upper Harlem Line, that connection is gone, but another route exists: via the Hudson Line. Today, NYC-Albany Empire Service trips are officially scheduled anywhere between 2:20 and 2:35, but much faster times are possible even with current equipment; I’ve been on a train that did the trip in 2:10, and that’s with the artificially low speed limits imposed by Metro-North’s commuter-rail oriented signalling and track maintenance south of Poughkeepsie. Two-hour trip times are definitely possible, and 1:45 is probably within the realm of possibility for an express (say, stopping only at Poughkeepsie). Meanwhile, the eastbound Lake Shore Limited is scheduled from Albany to Pittsfield in 1:04, only ten minutes slower than driving, meaning that a total NYC-Pittsfield trip time in the vicinity of 3 hours is eminently achievable. A trip to Pittsfield via Albany would require going out of the way a little bit (Albany is north of Chatham), and probably a reverse move or a cross-platform connection at Albany; the alternative would be to skip Albany and send trains directly to Pittsfield via a new connection from the northbound Hudson Line to the eastbound B&A at Castleton, yielding even shorter NYC-Berkshires trip times.  Either of these alternatives beats the hell out of pouring money into the Berkshires Division, even if CSX demands double-tracking of the B&A (which really isn’t that busy) as compensation for more passenger trains. Lastly–and far from least–any improvements to the Hudson Line made to facilitate Berkshires Service will also benefit the much more numerous Empire Service passengers. Rather than existing in a nostalgic vacuum, we can target investments in NYC-Berkshires service in a way that also helps many, many other travellers. It just requires a little interstate cooperation, always an interesting question in the fractious Northeast–and the topic of my post about a unified Northeastern rail authority.

So we can get passengers from New York City to Pittsfield in 3 hours or so, very competitive with the 2:53 driving time posited by Google Maps. Where do they go from there? Though Pittsfield is easily the biggest town in in the Berkshires (around 45,000), it is neither the wealthiest or the biggest tourist draw. Getting to Pittsfield is easy; distributing passengers where they actually want to go in the Berkshires is the harder part. And that’s where Massachusetts’ purchase of the Berkshire Line comes back into the picture. Rather than using it for intercity travel, the state should begin rehabilitating the line with the goal of establishing a frequent semi-rural transit service served by DMU equipment, like I proposed for the Pioneer Valley a while back. Essentially an express bus service serving the downtown cores of each of the smaller towns in the Berkshires, such a service could provide unprecedented car-free mobility to tourists–important in a region where many of the visitors come from New York. Travelers will be able to take a quick intercity trip to Pittsfield, hopefully helping that city in its economic revival, and then use the DMU service to move between the various small towns whose charms form the Berkshires’ appeal. Ideally, the “Berkshires Service” would extend north to Adams, North Adams, and potentially Williamstown as well as south to Sheffield, but 11 miles of the line north of Pittsfield (a former B&A branch, unlike the ex-New Haven trackage south of Pittsfield) have been abandoned and turned into a rail trail with a truly unspellable name, and it’s usually difficult to get trailized right-of-way back. Who knew that local state rep William “Smitty” Pignatelli might have actually stumbled on the right answer when he said of the purchase “Without knowing the commitment from Connecticut, we’ll end up with passenger trains from Pittsfield to Sheffield and that’s it”?  To which I say, “And that’s how it should be!”

In short: target investments where they can do the most good for the most people, even if that involves cooperation between states. Identify the right mode for your line, don’t just promise vaguely to bring back trains. Identify the quickest travel times, even if they don’t involve historic routings. And please god, take the tracks away from the Housatonic Railroad as soon as humanly possible (go look at the rogues’ gallery of derailment stories above if you haven’t yet!

UPDATE 7/30/14

This article in the Berkshire Edge offers some more details about the thinking of the people involved in dreaming up the new Berkshire Division plans, mainly from the perspective of Housatonic Railroad management. It sounds like Massachusetts is determined to stabilize the line’s infrastructure just to keep freight trains running, regardless of whether passenger service ever happens. The freight business on the line may be marginal, but there’s value in keeping trucks off the of the narrow, windy roads of the Berkshires, and the current situation, where the line was going more or less unmaintained, was unsustainable. In the meantime, someone fed the Edge a number of $200 million to rehabilitate the line all the way to a connection with the Harlem Line at Southeast, NY via the little-used Beacon Line, which seems ludicrously low, especially since it includes rehabilitating even more mileage that’s not currently used for passenger service (though service to NYC via Southeast would probably be faster than the Danbury Line). The paper estimated the cost of sidings, signalling, stations, and grade crossing and bridge rehab at $80 million (unclear whether that’s included in the $200 million number), which seems just as unlikely.

Project managers have identified four station sites–the existing Amtrak station in Pittsfield, and in Lee, Great Barrington, and Sheffield. Obviously, I’d advocate for a service that operates and stop more frequently, but 10-mile station spacing is even a little much for commuter rail–I think they could add a couple more stations. Meanwhile, the ridership numbers seem even higher than usual: “[Domina] pointed out that according to the 2010 ridership study conducted by Market Street Research of Northampton, the median ridership would be 2 million one-way fares within five years of commencing the commuter service. Of those, 1,086,874 fares would be associated with trips either to, from or within Berkshire County; 340,000 between Danbury and New Milford, Conn.; and 573,126 to other destinations in Connecticut.” Housatonic President John Hanlon claims that the service could be operationally profitable, though it wouldn’t be able to cover its capital costs. All of this seems pretty pie-in-the-sky.

Update 2, 7/30/14

Check out this thread on ArchBoston for even more information. I’d been searching for a New Haven-era timetable for the Berkshire Division, and commenter F-Line (a presence on the Railroad.net forums as well)  tracked one down. 5:20 Pittsfield–Grand Central trip times. Yeah, I stand by my position that Berkshire Division intercity passenger service would be a waste.