Rail approach to 30th St. Station in Philadelphia
I was in Philadelphia this weekend. It’s a great city whose downtown is booming. And I got to ride transit there for the first time in my various visits.
The picture above is one of the rail corridors approaching 30th St. Station, the station used by Amtrak. Because there’s a rail yard next to the station, this is a pretty wide example, but it shows that it isn’t just interstate highways that create barriers between neighborhoods in cities. Major rail corridors do the same thing.
People might argue that there’s a difference in that many rail lines were built prior to development, whereas the highways were plowed through existing neighborhoods in a highly destructive process of demolition and construction. No argument there. But now that they are built, they both operate as barriers nevertheless. I might also point out that many urban freeways, such as those in Chicago, were built closely parallel to existing rail lines that were already dividing walls.
I also rode the Market-Frankford Line subway, which is one of two rapid transit lines in Philly. The cars were modern and clean, though appear to be fairly low capacity (54 according to one web site compared to ~200 in NYC depending on the car in question). The platforms felt 30 degrees cooler than NYC’s saunas. They still use tokens.
I also unexpectedly needed to take a train out to the suburb of Paoli. It just so happens that’s also an Amtrak stop, so I generally take a one seat ride there on the Keystone train from Penn Station. This time I did some museuming in Philly first and decided to just train out instead of having my Paoli friend come join me in the city.
I’m glad I did this because I made the remarkable discovery that Philadelphia has amazingly good weekend train frequencies by US standards. The Paoli/Thorndale line (the Pennsylvania Railroad “Main Line”) runs half-hourly on Saturdays. It has 32 outbound trains on Saturdays, departing as late as 1:45am from Suburban Station.
The other lines seem to have hourly departures. There are 17 outbound trains on the Landsdale/Doylestown Line. The Manyunk/Norristown Line has 19 outbound trains.
This level of service crushes Boston, where the Providence Line has 9 trains, with as much as three hours between trains midday. The Framingham/Worcester Line also has 9 trains.
Chicago’s Metra Electric has good frequencies (it operates with separate service segments and multiple branches like say the Metro North New Haven Line so I can’t really describe it adequately as I’ve never ridden it enough to get a feel). But the rest of them have lower weekend frequenices than Philly. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe Line has 14 trains on Saturday, with two hour frequencies morning and evening. There are 13 on the UP-North Line.
Philadelphia is having some commuter rail problems. It had to take its entire fleet of new Silverliner V out of service this summer because of a structural defect in their trucks. But given that it has an entirely electrified system (much better acceleration than Boston and Chicago’s diesel fleets), a through-running system (albeit no longer marketed as such) and a good base of frequencies already, it would seem like the sky is the limit in terms of what they can do with it.
Good that you sampled Septa Regional Rail and the Market Frankford. As to your comment about Metra Electric Division I dissent strongly. Prior to Metra takeover the Illinois Central Electric had much better frequencies and span of service. There is a growing effort to restore “rapid transit” scale service that the ROW was built for. The class divide between “commuter rail” and “urban rapid transit” is a current topic on Yonah Freemark’s The Transport Politic blog. Septa “Regional Rail” such as the two Chestnut Hill routes are clearly urban as in directly competing with Septa bus and subway routes. (When I lived in the Germantown neighborhood, I could take the train which literally ran behind my apartment or the streetcar, now bus, to the subway–the difference was speed versus frequency)
As to your observation of rail ROWs (the other side of the tracks), on the far side of the river in your picture is the other RR in Philly and they both built by the river to access port facilities among other goals.
It’s an interesting question why there is such variation in service in our big cities, even between those that started growing at about the same time before autos? I know that subsequent management ran many into the ground, resulting in the poor service many places, but why are some systems that were built 120 years ago so complete while others only have a handful of lines running very few places? I’m wondering if there was such as short window when transit was widely popular that these places either got it done or missed the window.
A couple points of clarification:
The Market-Frankford Subway/Elevated M4 have a seated capacity of 54, they’re standee capacity isn’t quite as high as New York because they don’t have longitudinal seating. Also, keep in mind they’re a narrower loading gauge, similar to Chicago, PATH, and NY’s A division.
There’s actually a 3rd rapid transit line in Center City, PATCO. It’s a port authority line similar to PATH, without fare integration. The new farecard system SEPTA has in beta is eventually going to take PATCO Freedom cards, but not vice versa.
There’s also a “pre-metro” streetcar tunnel under center city with 5 branches into West Philly. A 6th line shares a terminus with one of them, but cuts across the north edge of Center CIty.
If you include the inner part of the western suburbs, there’s an additional rapid transit line, a fully grade separated legacy interurban called the Norristown HIgh Speed Line. Two partially grade separated streetcar lines also serve that area.
As I mentioned above, we have a light at the end of the tunnel for tokens. SEPTA Key, a contactless fare card system, is currently in open beta, but can only be used for day, week, and month passes. Unfortunately, they basically just digitised all the flaws of the token/transfer/pass system rather than move to a modern fare structure.
People think I’m crazy when I tell them how good Philly’s regional rail is, that it offers better frequency and denser stations than anywhere else in the US, other than NYC. Some of the lines are entirely within the city limits, and only 2 of them go deep into the suburbs, which is very different than other US systems. It’s the only thing in North America that comes close to a RER or S-bahn. The Center City Tunnel can handle vastly improved frequencies, the key bottleneck is the ex-Reading main line in North Philly, but even then the fixes aren’t that bad, they’ve just never gotten funding thanks to Harrisburg’s poisonously adversarial relationship with Philly.
oh, and also Drexel University, SEPTA, and Amtrak keep releasing plans for capping the railyards you pictured
Thanks for the comments.
Hi Aaron, and welcome to Philadelphia. I’m glad you had an interesting visit!
As a long-time commuter as well as transit buff, I have to say that Philadelphia’s network operates surprisingly well considering the many obstacles it faces. You can get to most parts of the city and to many suburban locations, sometimes quickly and comparatively cheaply, and sometimes not. As Mike noted, the system also offers about as wide a range of vehicle types as any other in this country – you can find commuter rail, heavy-rail and light-rail transit, bus, streetcar, interurban, and even trolleybus lines. If you decide to revisit the area, bring a camera, buy a day pass, and have some fun.
That said, many of us who are transit advocates are frustrated by how much of the system’s potential remains untapped. Some of it’s due to historical limitations: SEPTA (the municipal authority) was cobbled together over about a 20-year span from several privately-run systems. Most had been allowed to deteriorate during the car-crazed years of the 1950s and 60s, initially leaving SEPTA with the task of simply keeping them operational and later struggling to bring them up to minimally-acceptable standards. Private operations also left a legacy of incompatible operating characteristics, such as differing track gauges and station clearances, that permanently prevent full integration of some services. Also a number of rail projects were started in the early to mid-20th century but never completed, leaving the system more heavily dependent on buses.
To echo Mike again, SEPTA’s other constraints have been political and managerial. Pennsylvania is largely rural, with a legislature that’s often openly hostile to urban needs. Until recently SEPTA’s funding was only about a THIRD of that received by comparable systems in other states. Fortunately new legislation was finally enacted to provide larger and more-stable funding sources. Though still not fully adequate, money for SOGR projects and some improvements is now starting to flow. There have also been changes in the agency’s management that some of us are hoping will break down a long-term wall of “we’ve always done it that way” thinking, although that remains to be seen. Fingers crossed!
I’d underscore the variety of transit, and the ability to get most places, even in suburbs…including the airport.
An observation on the Paoli-Thorndale line (Paoli Local in my day, later R5): From the point it leaves the Philadelphia City Limits, just past Overbrook, the line runs through three of the top 25 public-school districts in the US (Lower Merion, Radnor, and Tredyffrin-Easttown) out to Paoli. These are uniformly high-income areas. Google “Philadelphia Main Line”.
It seems safe to assert that SEPTA suburban rail transit, like water, flows to money; the 4 suburban counties in the SEPTA region (Bucks, Montgomery, Chester, Delaware) are guaranteed 8 of 15 seats on the SEPTA board. The Paoli-Thorndale line crosses through Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester Counties (each the home of one of the three school districts noted above).