I rather think you systematically missed all of my points.
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Originally Posted by wanderer34
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsy...hore_Lines#RDC
I'm not just talking about whether electrification is necessary for the River Line or the Glassboro line. You have to remember that we're talking about 1950's technology here and it's not necessary to have electrification along the Glassboro or the River line. It's amazing that as recently as the late 1970s that rail service was still feasible from Camden and Philadelphia to Atlantic City, Ocean City, Wildwood, and Cape May with RDC train sets until Penn Central went belly up and it's assets were sold to Conrail.
As a result, Conrail ceased to run it's South Jersey trains until Amtrak stepped up and purchased the Atlantic City line during the 1980's until NJT took over that line in the 1990's. It's almost like asking how many engineers does it take to screw a lightbulb when a much simpler answer should be only one, which is why I didn't like the mode of operation for the River Line because I was afraid that it would delay any hope that heavy rail service would come back to South Jersey with the exception of The Atlantic City line.
Even when trains were starting to get unpopular during the 1950's into the 1980's, NJT could've at least provided some limited service from Camden into the Jersey Shore, not the same service as North Jersey, but more limited, with frequencies between a hour and up to two hours on the weekends. NJT underestimated the riding public in South Jersey, which is why many of the old rail lines had no service and placed all it's eggs in the NYC basket than placing another basket for Philly/South Jersey.
Also, the old Camden Terminal, which had the ferry slip and is where the current BB&T Center is currently located at, was the main rail hub for all of South Jersey. It reminds me a lot about Hoboken, another factory town just across NYC. If the powers that be wanted to replace the old Camden terminal, the best place for it would've been at the current site of the Walter Rand Transportation Center.
The only difference between Hoboken and Camden is that since Hoboken is across Manhattan, the financial and media capital of America and the world, is that Hoboken started to gentrify in the 1980's and transformed into a working class community into an upper class enclave while Camden until recently was bogged down due to deindustrialization, race riots, poverty, marginalization, globalization, and finally rampant violence. It has recently turned a page and recorded it's major crime drop, but Camden is still a shadow of what it once was in the early half of the 20th century.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/...=yhs-Lkry-SF01
Click on the second link and you'll see a picture of what Camden Terminal used to look like.
Read the first paragraph. The old South Jersey lines don't need electrification at all. This isn't SEPTA. It just need a simple diesel generator locomotive that can haul passengers from Camden and Philadelphia into South Jersey town all the way into the Jersey Shore. Does it need to be state of the art or cutting edge just to ensure ridership? Not necessary. It just needs to serve the riding public and I just don't understand why we need to throw money away just to create another gimmick when all that was needed was a simple diesel generator train set, some coaches, and yearly maintenance of the rail lines.
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There are at least three counterarguments here. The first is that the Millville Branch
was actually electrified at one point, so traffic on the line certainly warranted electrification at its peak. The second is that the lack of electrification was almost certainly a major driver of what doomed the South Jersey network in the 1970s and 1980s. The third is that
you are fundamentally misunderstanding what the point of electrification is here.
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We're not talking placing high-speed rail like the Acela and the new Avella Liberty, but heavy rail commuter service which is common in places like Long Island, Westchester, North Jersey, and the Chicagoland areas. The blame does go the NJT since they didn't know how to manage the rail service and rail frequency in South Jersey compared to North Jersey. If there's less commuters, you run less trains and less passenger coaches, at least an hour every weekday or every two hours every weekend.
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I don't think you even know what you're talking about here. There's some stuff that's right but it's mashed up with so much misused technical vocabulary (for one thing, Metra and the LIRR is
not "heavy rail") that it's hard to pull out. However, you are right that frequency (or the lack thereof) is what doomed the South Jersey network, and the lack of frequency can be traced back to inadequate equipment and operations. If this is the case, however, then your entire proposed solution set is, well, utterly counterproductive. The River Line succeeded because it re-established a line with reasonable (I mean, Japanese inaka, but still "reasonable" by rock-bottom American standards) frequency along a corridor that badly needed it. More such corridors are of course in evidence in South Jersey, and similar technology can and should be used to re-establish frequencies where needed.
The reason I want to advance electrification on both the River Line and on this line is because the real goal of the South Jersey network needs to be to reach Philadelphia, and doing so will require a substantial investment in new infrastructure (most of it underground) which will require electrification. However, that's still a far-off conversation which requires considerable consensus building in a part of New Jersey where the current challenge is restoring services on lines which once had it. So, again, back to the fine-for-the-purpose Stadlers until there's a large enough constituency of rail riders to demand serious infrastructure upgrades.
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Mass transit is a big factor why the Greater Philadelphia area hasn't grown as fast as Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and it's peer cities of DC and Boston.
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Um, wait, what was the point of this again? Because this is a total non sequitur. Nobody in their right mind would lump these two classes of city together in terms of quality of mass transit service.
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It's not the service to Glassboro that I'm against, but I'd rather see heavy rail and the state of NJ spending less money on decent rail service and rail maintenance than making everything "smoke and mirrors" when we're renovating a line, and the fact that it's light rail is a slap in the face to the great PRR and the RDG. I still feel that the reason why the River Line was so expensive wasn't because it was just light rail, but a lot of the contractors wanted a lot of money (pork) just to place a toy train when all that was needed was to restore rail and place new heavy rail rolling stock onto the River and connect the River Line to Trenton Station via the Northeast Corridor, which would've made more sense than giving the River Line it's own platform across for Trenton Station.
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This is a point with a lot of traction in the community, that there is a problematic trend towards
cost maximalization in mass transit investments. So despite your consistently wrong use of the term "heavy rail" (which refers to subways, not to mainline rail) and your appeal to nostalgia this is not that wildly off the mark. However, given that the pilot line already uses Stadler GTKs and the connection to mainline rail is all but nonexistent, network extensions can and should continue to use GTKs along with upgrading the tracks (which is a real cost center here, the trackbeds are in unfathomably bad condition). The real mystery is why this project has kicked around the engineering offices for the last 15 years instead of actually getting built to that the Millville extension and other new South Jersey lines could get worked on.[/quote]
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.