Northstar Commuter Rail

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TroyGBiv
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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby TroyGBiv » February 14th, 2019, 8:01 pm

I hope this happens!

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby mulad » February 15th, 2019, 7:16 am

Here's a link to Wolgamott's HF1179 bill: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.p ... n_number=0

The as-introduced version appropriates $850,000 from the general fund for "assessment, analysis, and review" (whee... more study), and a couple of fill-in-the-blank spots for appropriating existing bond proceeds for "predesign and design" and selling new bonds to make up for that appropriation.

If there is money left over from the "predesign and design" bond appropriation, it can be used for "preliminary and final engineering; environmental analysis and mitigation; land acquisition, including right-of-way and temporary or permanent easements; and capital improvements to tracks, signals, and rail crossings." There's also an instruction for MnDOT to begin negotiating with BNSF as soon as any necessary project development is done.

There are also supposed to be reports issued in October 2020 and October 2021 to give status updates and feedback to the legislature about what MnDOT might need from them.

One issue I have with this is that it's relying on bonding for what could be a significant amount of money, and unfortunately the Minnesota state constitution has a $200 million at any given time on bonds "to improve and rehabilitate railroad rights-of-way and other rail facilities". (See Article 11, Sec. 5.i.) I think that limit was added sometime in the early 1980s (Wikisource has versions of the constitution up until 1980, and they don't include the $200m limit). Unfortunately, that's a "par value" (face value) limit, so it can't really be interpreted as something that could be adjusted for inflation from the time it was added to the constitution.

Anyway, I've seen earlier cost estimates for the Northstar extension running into the $250 million range, though I think the bulk of that cost could probably be divided into 3 categories: A permanent easement with BNSF for station sites and operating on the ~30 miles of track from Big Lake to St. Cloud (the original Northstar easement cost $107.5 million of the $317.5 million total), a third main track from BNSF's Northtown Yard up to the Coon Creek junction where the Hinckley Subdivision branches off to take trains to Duluth (likely another $100 million, though that cost could be shared with NLX, and a big chunk of that cost might be another easement), and then the costs to build stations (probably $10-15 million each, based on the $11 million it cost to add the Ramsey station).

If they continue to use the existing station location in St. Cloud (which is at or near my preferred spots for having a stop), there might also be a need to grade-separate East St. Germain Street -- it gets blocked whenever the Empire Builder stops there, and I'm not quite sure if a standard Northstar train will fit in that spot without needing to block the roadway. There would probably need to be some added track in St. Cloud for layovers, too.

Of course, there should be some federal funds available to tap, but unfortunately this project could completely swap that $200 million limit. I guess I'd like to compromise a bit and allocate a bit over $100 million with the intent of doing that third main line project, since there has been engineering work done on it in the past (it had once been up for a TIGER grant, but didn't get money from that extremely competitive pool of money), it would benefit both Northstar and NLX, and if neither extension really comes to fruition, the third main would allow increased service on the existing Northstar route.

Of course, increasing the general fund appropriation decreases any need to use up that $200 million amount. Also, I suspect you might be able to sneak money for easements past that limit, since that's not directly paying for improving/rehabilitating the railroad, just getting access to it.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby DanPatchToget » February 15th, 2019, 7:35 am

I'm hoping they don't assume a terminus at East St. Cloud Park & Ride. They could build a stop there for all the park & riders, but there also needs to be a stop at the Amtrak depot and good bus connections to downtown.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby alexschief » February 15th, 2019, 8:57 am

I'm sure this topic has been bludgeoned to death in past years, but a couple thoughts...

The current St. Cloud Station location is pretty unfortunate. Ideally, the station would be on the other side of the river, at the north end of the downtown, but the bend into downtown St. Cloud is single track and looks useful to BNSF, I'm assuming it is not on the table. Building more tracks in that ROW and a new bridge should be looked at, but I assume it'll prove way too costly and tight on space. Seems essential then to do a station area planning process like the SWLRT for the current station site. The Northern Metals Recycling and Simonson Lumber properties would need to be bought out (I assume both may actually use the railroad today, which may make things trickier for relocating them) and the land redeveloped as housing (of course, it'll probably become a massive parking lot, but that should be resisted). I'd also want to see cross-river protected bikeways built so that the station is accessible to St. Cloud St. students.

I assume at most, one other station would be called for, at Becker? The combined populations of Clear Lake and Clearwater are about 2,300, that doesn't seem anywhere near enough to justify a stop. Becker's population is nearly 5,000, which is extremely marginal, but the proposed Google development there might tip it over the top.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby MNdible » February 15th, 2019, 10:00 am

Question: while the third main project would certainly be useful in general, I'm not sure I understand why this project would trigger the need to build it. It's not actually going to be adding more trains through the junction, right? It would only send the trains that are already running through it to St. Cloud.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby mulad » February 15th, 2019, 10:34 am

Metra has a few lines that end in cities of 5,000-10,000 people, so I think having a line that stops in Becker on the way to a bigger city/mini-metro is perfectly fine. It's harder to make a case for Clear Lake, though that town gets a lot more car traffic than you'd expect since it is near the only crossing of the Mississippi River between St. Cloud and Big Lake/Monticello. A lot of people cross the river there to access I-94, either for going to/from the east side of St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids, or down to Becker.

MnDOT's traffic mapping app indicates that traffic on Highway 24 crossing the river from Clearwater is around 16,000 AADT, dropping to 10,500 on the east side of U.S. 10 in Clear Lake, and then plummeting to 1,950 as the road becomes 80th Ave on the east side of U.S. 10. Most of that traffic goes north toward the east side of St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids (AADT of 20,400 on U.S. 10 in that direction), though a decent chunk of it must go south toward Becker (AADT of 14,500 heading south). Highway 10 doesn't get past 20k AADT again until you get down to about halfway between Big Lake and Elk River. (Part of the reason for the big drop between the river and Clear Lake is that there's also a parallel River Road that some people use to go north to St. Cloud or southeast to Becker.)

Of course, that's probably more of an argument for adding stations elsewhere rather than in Clear Lake itself. Ideally, a lot of those car trips through the town wouldn't happen at all because people are on the train already in St. Cloud or Becker.

As for the third main, I've always had trouble imagining how service could extend to St. Cloud with the current fleet of trains and maintenance base where it currently is. Presumably that facility would have been built in St. Cloud if the whole route had been funded in the first place, though I'm not sure if we could have ever had that one reverse-flow trip in the morning and evening. Right now, that train turns around pretty quickly, with no time left for going the rest of the way to St. Cloud.

I also figure that St. Cloud service should have more of a regional train service pattern, with multiple trips through the day and not just during commute hours. If we kept the same arrival times at Target Field that we have today, and presumably added another trainset for the reverse trip, the first morning trip would probably leave St. Cloud at like 4:20 am, with the last one going at something like 6:35 am. You really need something that would run when more people are awake and mobile.

The existing trains all just sit at Target Field for much of the day, with the last one arriving at 8:10 am and the first one leaving at 3:57 pm. Making Northstar more cost-effective requires using those trains for more hours out of the day.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby MNdible » February 15th, 2019, 11:30 am

We've discussed this before, but I am hugely skeptical that non-commuter hour trains would ever have the ridership to justify running a diesel locomotive. If the reason to run trains to regional centers is to reduce carbon emissions, then running a mostly empty trainset does not make sense. Or are we pushing for this service just because we like the idea of trains?

Here's the part of the forum where people say "But I would ride a train to St. Cloud once a year, so therefore the ridership would be substantial."

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby Silophant » February 15th, 2019, 11:41 am

Actually, I would ride a train to St. Cloud twice a year, so the ridership would be overwhelming.
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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby tmart » February 15th, 2019, 11:47 am

We've discussed this before, but I am hugely skeptical that non-commuter hour trains would ever have the ridership to justify running a diesel locomotive. If the reason to run trains to regional centers is to reduce carbon emissions, then running a mostly empty trainset does not make sense. Or are we pushing for this service just because we like the idea of trains?

Here's the part of the forum where people say "But I would ride a train to St. Cloud once a year, so therefore the ridership would be substantial."
I agree with the principle, but I also think it's a bit more complicated. To do this kind of calculus, we also need to know how service affects people's habits: for example, does an evening train cause more people to take the commuter-hours train, because it's a safety net that they won't be stranded if they have to work late? Are there people for whom those couple recreational trips a year make the difference between wanting/needing a car and being able to get by without one? Does the station enable or accelerate dense/low-car development in its immediate surroundings, or investments in local transit, and if so, does a limited service schedule undermine that effect? And do these cumulative effects, to the extent that they exist, outweigh the carbon emitted by the diesel trains?

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby DanPatchToget » February 15th, 2019, 12:07 pm

There needs to be regional rail service or ridership is going to be stagnant. How about purchasing a DMU (with an extra as a spare) that goes back and forth between Target Field and St. Cloud during the day and evening while the diesel locomotives take care of peak hour service when the extra capacity is needed? To get some more productivity out of the diesel locomotives have a few peak period trips between St. Cloud and SPUD, and one consist going back and forth between Target Field and SPUD during the day. Yes more locomotives and coaches will be needed, but I'm pretty sure with just the St. Cloud extension we'll need more.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby mulad » February 15th, 2019, 4:00 pm

It would probably be best to transition to DMUs over the long term, though I wouldn't necessarily recommend jumping into that quite yet.

Okay, revisiting the numbers a bit, you could probably manage something close to the existing schedule by splitting the current Northstar fleet up into five active daily trainsets with one spare. They have six locomotives and 18 passenger cars (12 regular cars and 6 cab cars), which is enough for six, though they typically only run four daily trainsets -- I think one of them typically doubles up on its locomotives (probably the first inbound, which ends up also being the last inbound because it's the one that does the reverse trip), so if they still like having that as a security blanket, maybe we could get by with just getting one more locomotive.

Based on the existing schedule, I'd estimate that a train to St. Cloud would take 1h20 to go 66 miles, vs. 52 minutes for the existing 39-mile trip. (This is assuming that the segment between Big Lake and St. Cloud would run at the same 57-58 mph average speed that it's scheduled to do from Big Lake down to Fridley, although the slow section through Northtown Yard and the rest of the to Target Field drops the average over the existing route to 45 mph.)

If you were to run trains that fast all day long, and you could manage to maintain a 10-minute turnaround, you would have 3-hour headways with a single train, 1.5 hours with 2, 1 hour with 3, or every half-hour with six trains. Of course, the rush-hour period doesn't even last 3 hours, so I think you could fake it with one less train, then reduce frequency to hourly or less during the rest of the day.

Hypothetically, if the existing 5:52 am arrival at Target Field turned and left at 6:02 am (instead of 6:15 am), it could get to St. Cloud at 7:22 am, though that's already after the present final southbound departure of 7:18 am in Big Lake. You'd have to insert one more morning/afternoon trip pair to maintain the existing schedule. We theoretically have the equipment for it, but the easement rights with BNSF would likely need renegotiation.

For the rest of the day, if we can get service added, a 10-minute layover is probably way too tight, so if you want to do clock-face scheduling, you're most likely going to want to just lengthen that 3-hour round-trip per train to 4 hours, which could lead to a fairly long layover of 40 minutes. That would mean one train for 4-hour headways, 2 trains for service every 2 hours, and 4 trains for hourly service.

Of course, you can flip the scheduling equation on its head -- if it takes four hours for a train to begin its second round-trip anyway, then it might make more sense to only run the train as fast as necessary to make that round-trip cycle rather than as fast as possible. I believe freight trains on the route are limited to a max speed of 60 mph, which is only a little bit above Northstar's average speed of 57 mph along the same segment.

If you drop the average speed over the route by 5 or 10 mph for added midday trips, it might make the trip take 1h30 or 1h40 to go the whole distance, but could let the Northstar slot in between existing freights, which would probably make BNSF a lot more willing to allow more trains on their line. Northstar train + Northstar Link bus trips take 1h42 to 2h02 to/from downtown St. Cloud for the existing rush-hour trips, so if we had a service that ran 22 to 42 minutes faster for St. Cloud residents during peak times, and was still 2 to 32 minutes faster for off-peak travel, I think it'd get to be fairly popular with people up there.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby jebr » February 17th, 2019, 7:50 pm

Yeah, 10 minutes is definitely too tight to reliably turn a train. Metra's done this, but even they're having to change that a bit (I think to 12 minutes?) just to account for the increased time it takes to turn a train under current PTC implementations.

I think an every-two-hour service would be the sweet spot on this route. I'm not sure exactly how busy they are, but both Executive Express and Groome Transportation run frequent-ish (I think every hour to hour and a half) airport shuttles from St. Cloud to MSP Airport. There's also 3-4 schedules each way each day from Jefferson Lines, along with the Northstar Link service. There's also the once-a-day Empire Builder, though the timing and perennial delays make it unlikely to be used much for St. Cloud - St. Paul traffic. Based on my anecdotal travel between the two cities, I'm guessing that Jefferson Lines doesn't get a ton of traffic between St. Cloud - MSP (metro area); maybe a dozen or so on that route. Executive Express and Groome Transportation likely have a fair amount of origin/destination traffic, though I'm not sure how much of that would be replaced by the Northstar train. I think Executive Express is better positioned in that regard; they've already got a market share that can command a higher premium than other options ($78 round-trip vs. $38 for Groome,) they're better-located in the western part of the St. Cloud metro, and they're not solely reliant on St. Cloud - MSP Airport traffic to make the route work (they've got a lot of central Minnesota destinations to pull traffic from.)

My guess is that you may see some opposition from both of these companies on the extension, since they would likely lose some business from a Northstar extension. This would be doubly so if the extension also results in all-day service. Hopefully that won't kill it and wouldn't result in losing the option for overnight parking at the park-and-rides, but it's probably the area where you'll get the most serious opposition. I'd guess that Jefferson Lines would be fine with it and may even encourage it; if well positioned, you may be able to talk with them to do through-ticketing once someone arrived in Minneapolis, whether it be routing them through St. Paul Union Depot or having them walk through the skyway from the 5th Street Transportation Center to Hawthorne.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby mulad » March 1st, 2019, 11:24 am

[Argh, I'm writing a long post again...]

I went up to St. Cloud last Friday to testify at the hearing, though it took me all day and I only got to speak for three minutes. I did submit a written version that was about twice as long, though, so maybe someone read that. I was kind of hoping to post some video of the testimony, but it looks like they probably won't post it, since St. Cloud isn't part of the video system they normally use at the capitol complex.

The primary things I pointed out were that the existing Northstar carries more people than you might think, that the weekend schedule is complementary to the weekday schedule (so it would be great to combine them), that Big Lake is the busiest station outside of Minneapolis, and the travel time improvement I mentioned earlier here.

It's a little strange to wrap your head around, since the current weekday schedule of one train every 30 minutes doesn't sound like a lot, but it's carrying enough people in those runs to be equivalent to running commuter coach buses (56 seats) at least every 7 minutes (fully packed), and with the excess seating they have, it's probably more like one bus every 3.5 minutes. When Northstar itself gets fully packed for special event trains, it can be carrying upwards of 1,800 people, which is more than 32 buses (or at least one bus every 55 seconds if you were to spread that over half an hour).

Of course, that's basically talking the maximum load on the route, which it probably only achieves toward the southern end, either between Coon Rapids and Fridley, or south of Fridley. But the Big Lake station alone averages 58 boardings per trip on weekdays, so there'd be a need for more than two full coach buses per half hour just for that station.

On weekends, the demand drops a lot, though Big Lake remains pretty busy, averaging 59 boardings per trip. The relatively sustained activity is despite the fact that the Northstar Link bus only meets the train once in the morning and once in the evening, even though there are three round-trips for the train. Notably, ridership drops a lot more at other stations on the weekend. Unfortunately, Metro Transit only provides overall boardings for Northstar stops, and not for each direction, so it's a bit hard to say, but there are probably 47-57 inbound boardings per trip from Elk River on weekdays (the next stop down the line, and the 2nd-busiest outside of Minneapolis), but only 19-24 per trip on weekends, so Big Lake is roughly 2.5 to 3x as busy on weekends as Elk River, and even further ahead of other stops.

Weekend service right now averages around 740 riders per day. I think if we added the three daily weekend round-trips to Northstar's weekday schedule, we'd at increase the daily ridership of 2,800 or so by at least as much -- putting it in the minimum ballpark of 3,550 or so, and it there's a good chance the added trips would encourage more people to take the train during commute hours too. And if you can extend the train to St. Cloud, it should go significantly higher.

Put another way, adding a few round-trips outside commute hours should bump the Northstar to about 1 million annual rides, and connecting to St. Cloud should bump that up a lot more. The 2010 State Rail Plan (Draft Tech Memo 3) says that St. Cloud should have a demand of about 712,500 annual passengers by 2030 (modeled using a 20¢/mile fare, vs. the 16¢/mi fares the line currently has), which I believe would mostly be in addition to existing ridership. I suppose there's a fair amount of overlap with existing passengers, but I think you could reasonably estimate Northstar getting into the 1.5 million annual range -- hopefully 5,300-5,600 per weekday?

Anyway, since this post is getting long, I'll just finish by saying there's also a companion Senate bill now, SF 1892. Since the MN Senate is still Republican-controlled, it would be good to contact state senators to push for that to be adopted. (The senator who introduced it is a Republican, Jerry Relph, so maybe there's hope...)

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby mattaudio » March 1st, 2019, 11:44 am

What was up with that ridiculous extend-to-Camp-Ripley concept? And any hope for the extension to terminate west of the Mississippi in St. Cloud? It seems like the ideal would be to have a suburban-style station at that Lincoln Ave P&R near Hwy 10, then run across the existing river bridge to have a station right in Downtown St. Cloud. They could even have another suburban-style station near Hwy 15/Crossroads Mall and have a O&M facility somewhere along that old GN rail line that parallels Division St.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby tmart » March 1st, 2019, 12:51 pm

Anyway, since this post is getting long, I'll just finish by saying there's also a companion Senate bill now, SF 1892. Since the MN Senate is still Republican-controlled, it would be good to contact state senators to push for that to be adopted. (The senator who introduced it is a Republican, Jerry Relph, so maybe there's hope...)
Given the extremely narrow margin in the Senate, it would only take one more GOP Senator in addition to Relph (and unanimous support from the DFL) to pass a floor vote. Though I don't know about how it could get held up by GOP folks who control committees or make choices about which bills come to a vote.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby jebr » March 1st, 2019, 12:58 pm

What was up with that ridiculous extend-to-Camp-Ripley concept?
Based on what I was reading, it sounded like the proposal was basically to see if any additional federal funding sources come up if it connects to some sort of military base. The rationale is a bit wonky, but if it costs less to serve Camp Ripley and Little Falls than what could be gained by other funding sources, I wouldn't be opposed to it. Little Falls has a bit over 8,000 people, and there'd likely be a bit of Little Falls - St. Cloud traffic. I probably wouldn't spend a lot of state money to do so, but if it opens up a lot of federal money it'd probably be worth it. Hopefully in such a situation there'd be frequent service to St. Cloud, medium service to Little Falls, and then Camp Ripley would be only on an as-needed basis or limited schedule (maybe during drill weekends?)

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby mulad » March 1st, 2019, 12:59 pm

The Camp Ripley extension would be studied with Tim O'Driscoll's bill, HF 856 / SF 1083. He seemed pretty supportive of extending Northstar at the beginning of the hearing last Friday, but then basically made a complete 180 in further comments. He said there were nine communities north of St. Cloud that had expressed interest in stops (though I can really only identify about six nodes of population on the line). At least of those would be in the immediate St. Cloud area -- Sauk Rapids (nearing 14k people) and Sartell (nearing 18k). The other biggest towns are Little Falls (8.7k) and Rice (1.3k).

Even though St. Cloud alone is about 68k, the urbanized area including its immediate neighbors is about 110k (and the overall metro population including more rural areas is 194k). It seems like O'Driscoll really just intends to slow down the idea of extending to St. Cloud by making the study more complicated. He said at the hearing that he didn't want to see the line extended to St. Cloud, only to have further extensions studied later, which just sounded ridiculous to me. I'd bet that if we were proposing study of an extension further north to Brainerd and Baxter (the two of which add up to nearly 22k, and their mini-metro of Crow Wing and Cass counties adds up to 92k), he'd probably be pushing the opposite direction, saying we need to study this in stages...

I'm not sure what to say about station locations other than that a variety of options could be included in the study, though I'd really prefer to keep that as simple as possible so things could happen quickly. I personally think the current Amtrak station is the best option for a single stop. If you want more, I tend to think adding Sauk Rapids and Sartell would be a bigger bang for the buck than crossing the river. If you do want to make that turn, I'd suggest extending the line all the way to St. Joseph, which would be a good spot for capturing people driving south toward St. Cloud and the Twin Cities on I-94.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby DanPatchToget » March 1st, 2019, 2:56 pm

I also lean towards using the Amtrak depot. Have a local bus connecting to all train arrivals and departures.

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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby mister.shoes » March 1st, 2019, 2:57 pm

Regarding St. Joe: there are a ton of CSB|SJU students who could make use of such a stop.
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Re: Northstar Commuter Rail

Postby mulad » May 2nd, 2019, 6:08 pm

$4 million in upgrades planned at the Northstar commuter rail maintenance facility in Big Lake as Metro Transit prepares for mid-life overhauls of locomotives and passenger cars.

https://finance-commerce.com/2019/05/no ... m-upgrade/


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