Proposed main level train room.

Amtrak released its long range plan for Union Station yesterday. If implemented, the proposed redesign will accommodate double the train service and triple the number of passengers as compared with the existing station.

The plan looks pretty nice, and includes some beautiful features. Foremost among them is a new European-style train room that would be unprecedented in North America. Instead of boarding trains from a dim cavern below the parking garage, riders would board from a brightly-lit glass enclosure.

Despite that, I can’t help but feel a little bit nervous about the whole thing.

A hundred years ago almost every major American city had a beautiful train station. Unfortunately many were destroyed during the 20th Century. Of those that survived, the vast majority are mere shells of their former selves. Washington Union Station is one of the only exceptions. It’s an absolutely beautiful historic building that remains active, vital, and functioning as an extremely busy train station. In my opinion it’s the best intercity rail station in America.

And so when plans come forward to dramatically change it, I get a little bit worried. So many of the country’s train stations have been ruined by redevelopment, it’s clearly a dangerous business.

But Union Station does legitimately need to be expanded. It’s a bottleneck that limits all of its rail users: Amtrak, MARC, VRE, even Metro. More capacity is needed, if not today then surely by this plan’s ~2030 timeline. So more slots for more trains have to be accommodated somehow.

So Union Station must expand, but carefully. The key concern with any potential redesign must be the continued health and vitality of the historic building. Amtrak must not allow its greatest station to suffer the fate of so many of its one-time peers. Expansion is fine, but the old building must not be replaced, even in function. Supplement, but don’t take over.

Thanks to historic preservation there is no danger that Washington Union Station will be bulldozed and replaced by a modern version, as New York’s famous Penn Station was. But there might be a danger that Washington would follow the example of Denver, where that city’s Union Station will soon be converted to a hotel, and all of its rail functions moved to new buildings directly behind the old depot.

The key demand for any expansion of Union Station must be that the original building continue to function as an integral part of the depot. Most Amtrak, MARC, and VRE passengers should continue to pass through it, and the concourse facilities should be as close as possible.

It’s true that many of the rail-related functions moved out of the original building decades ago. Nevertheless, the expansions so far have resulted in a seamless whole. Casual users don’t notice where the old building ends and the new one begins. Just about everyone passes through the original depot, which still includes ticketing, and remains where most internal Union Station circulation takes place.

Any expansion must work the same way.

So how does this new plan perform?

The general premise of the plan is to basically do two things: 1) Double the number of stub-end tracks on the main level, and 2) dramatically expand the lower food court level, adding new tracks and 2 additional waiting areas further north than the current concourse.

Proposed main level floor plan.

Proposed lower level floor plan, showing new concourses.

The main level concourse that was built in the 1980s will be renovated and enlarged. This is great news. It’s not a historic space, so renovating it is no loss (and will probably be a big improvement), and it is the most convenient location for a concourse to be accessed via the old building. These improvements should guarantee that the front of the building remains very important, and heavily used.

Behind the renovated front concourse, the existing train room will be replaced by a new European-style open version. This continues the existing layout, but with a vastly superior design. Thumbs up to that.

The two new lower level concourses will unfortunately serve to disperse users further away from the main building. Hopefully they will draw just enough people to remain busy themselves, but not so many that they become the new center of the station.

The middle concourse will be reserved for MARC and VRE. It does make sense to separate them from intercity traffic, so if there’s going to be a new concourse then this one makes sense.

The northernmost concourse will offer redundant access to all platforms. It’s there so users from NoMa don’t have to walk south to the main entrance and then backtrack north. As long as most of the station’s amenities remain in the front, this secondary access point will remain less convenient for most users, and therefore should not be a major problem.

The walkway connecting the two new northern concourses to the main building is called the center concourse. As the hub for two of the three boarding areas, this will surely become a busy area. It could threaten the old building’s vitality if too many rider amenities are moved from the front of the station to this walkway. The main ticket counter, for example, should remain in the old building. But as long as this walkway remains just a walkway, and does not take on the functions of a terminal, it should not be a problem.

All in all, there seems to be enough activity remaining in and near the old building to guarantee its continued use. There are lots of new things further north, but they appear to remain secondary to the front. These changes should make Union Station even better than it is now.

But I’m still a touch nervous. A lot will depend on the details of where rider amenities are located.

Here are more images from the report:

Overview of the entire development, including air-rights buildings.	Proposed new rear entrance, leading directly to the glass-enclosed train room.	Proposed new central concourse, as seen from approximately the current concourse-to-parking garage escalator.
Elevators leading from one of the lower concourses up into the train room.	Proposed new rear entrance.	Proposed renovation to the existing stub-end concourse.

Amtrak has updated its long term plan to bring European-like high-speed rail to the Northeast Corridor. Upgrading Acela from sort of high-speed rail to really high-speed rail would cost $151 billion through 2040. For that investment, we’d get a 220-mph train that would deliver riders from Washington to New York in 94 minutes.

For more details, check out Amtrak’s 42-page vision plan (pdf). In the mean time, imagine stepping on to the platform at Union Station and seeing one of these:

The Atlantic Cities had an interesting article a couple of days ago about Chinatown buses. What I found even more interesting than the article itself was the the accompanying map.

Check out the Railplane, a wacky proposal from the 1930s for a high speed rail system of elevated trains powered by airplane propellers.

From Wikipedia:

“The Bennie Railplane was a form of rail transport invented by George Bennie (1891–1957), which moved along an overhead rail by way of propellers. Despite superficial appearances, it was not a monorail, as it used both an overhead running rail and a guide rail below. It was intended to run above conventional railways, separating faster passenger traffic from slower freight traffic. A prototype ran over a 130-yard (120 m) line at Milngavie near Glasgow in the 1930s, but Bennie was never able to secure funding for further development and went bankrupt in 1937. The line was demolished for scrap in the 1950s.”

Check out this bus station in Cleveland, courtesy friend ofBeyondDC MPK:

Look familiar? Here’s DC’s version, on New York Avenue:

Photo by Elvert Barnes.

I wonder whether Cleveland’s version or DC’s came first, and whether any other cities have one.

How do you take a bike on Amtrak? Apparently you box it. Seen a week or two ago at Union Station:

With construction well under way, Silver Spring’s new multimodal transit center is rising quickly from the ground. It seems a good time to share details of this important project.

The new center will consolidate just about every mode of transit imaginable into a single station, to be named for former US Senator Paul Sarbanes. It will include:

• 34 bus bays for use by local, commuter, and intercity buses.
• Kiss & Ride facilities for cars.
• A taxi stand.
• The Metropolitan Branch bike/ped trail.
• Bike racks (and maybe a bikesharing station, if Montgomery County joins Capital Bikeshare).
• Improved connections to the existing MARC and Metrorail platforms.
• A commuter store.
• Three major parks/plazas for civic use and passenger waiting.

Overall, Sarbanes Station will become the largest multimodal transportation depot in the Washington region, after Union Station.

Plans and renderings of the project are below, courtesy Montgomery County.

Overview rendering, showing Metro at bottom right and Colesville Rd at bottom left.	Lower level plan, showing plazas at the Metro entrance and Wayne Avenue, bus bays, the transit store, and the trail.
Middle level plan, showing bus bays and the Wayne Avenue entrance/park.	Upper level plan, showing Kiss & Ride and taxi facilities.
Two views of plaza in front of the Metro station entrance.
The trail, in its temporary pre-Purple line location.	The future Purple Line’s addition.
View of mid-level bus bays.	View of mid-level plaza.

The design under construction is at least the third iteration. The previous two versions of the design were both quite different. For the sake of posterity, here they are:

The original design featured a grand stair, but didn’t leave room for the Purple Line.

The second design was focused around a luxurious “hanging garden” waiting room. Courtesy Torti Gallas.

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

Amtrak Acela. Photo by jpmeuller99.

The Federal government announced today $2 billion in new grants for high-speed passenger rail projects around the country. $800 million will go to rail improvements along the Northeast Corridor, and $300 million for high-speed rail in California.

The funds are left over from $2.4 billion which had been originally allocated to Florida, but which governor Rick Scott returned to the Federal government. Congress rescinded $400 million as part of the recent budget deal, leaving $2 billion to allocate to new recipients.

Despite ideological opposition from a number of Republican governors, there was no shortage of states interested in using the money. USDOT received 98 applications for the funds from 24 states plus the District of Columbia, totaling approximately $10 billion. Clearly there continues to be more demand for passenger rail funding than Congress can keep up with.

As expected, the big winners are the Northeast Corridor and the California high-speed rail project, each of which were given hundreds of millions of dollars. In a little bit of surprise, the Midwest Chicago-hub was also a big winner, with major improvements funded on several corridors.

The Washington region didn’t receive any funds directly, although we will benefit from some of the projects to the north and south. The District applied for but did not receive money. Maryland applied for $415 million and received $22 million that will go to planning for a new Susquehanna River bridge. Ironically, Virginia didn’t apply for any money but received some anyway, as part of a North Carolina-led application to perform environmental planning work on proposed upgrades to the Richmond-Raleigh corridor.

The Northeast Corridor will benefit from the $450 million devoted to catenary and signal improvements in central New Jersey. This funding will pay for installation of constant-tension catenary over a 24-mile section of track, raising the top speed from 135 to 160 miles per hour. Other Corridor improvements will result in minor trip time improvements and reduction in bottlenecks.

The complete breakdown of grant recipients is shown in the table below. The acronym “NEPA”, which appears a number of times, refers to the National Environmental Policy Act requirement for environmental planning approval of federally-funded projects.

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

Since the popularization of Chinatown buses to New York, and the subsequent launch of BoltBus and MegaBus, intercity bus travel in the US has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years. Greyhound hasn’t received nearly the hype of its newer “competitors” (in quotes because Bolt is 50% owned by Greyhound), but the old standard is still out there, with routes going just about everywhere.

I’ve always been curious about where Greyhound goes, so I dug up their system map. Here’s a zoomed-in version of the national map, centered on DC. Click the image to download the full national map.

The different colors indicate whether routes are operated by Greyhound itself or a contracting service.

Megabus is making Washington a major hub. Beginning on Wednesday, December 15, the popular low-cost intercity bus company will expand its destinations available from Washington from only New York to these ten new cities:

Map by BeyondDC.

More information is available at the Megabus website.

Update: Map updated to include Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Christiansburg, and to change the word “routes” to “destinations”.