urbanMSP

Rode the Northstar this evening for the first time in 4 years. It'll be interesting to see the ridership data with the service increase. Anecdotally I saw around 30 people on the northbound trip and around 12 people on the reverse-commute trip (3 of them transferred from the Northstar Link bus in Big Lake). In Big Lake there were 8 people waiting to get on the Northstar Link. Surprisingly I saw one other person who rode the Orange Line from South Bloomington, transferred to the light rail in downtown, and then got on Northstar.

Have there been any recent efforts to study/build an infill station at Foley Blvd? The 2022 P&R report said it had 164 vehicles/day. While not much (though it's probably a little higher now), this could increase Northstar ridership a bit for relatively low cost.

Foley Blvd is now grade separated at the BNSF tracks so there's now opportunity to add a platform. I wonder if they can get away with one platform on the east side. A full station would require a bridge over the tracks and elevators.

Northstar trains have to use the east/southbound track (the westernmost track) to access Fridley Station, so building a station at Foley Boulevard with only a platform on the west/northbound track (the easternmost track) would require adding a crossover somewhere between Fridley and Foley.

Remember that, even though it's not moving particularly quickly, the NLX project received a big chunk of state funding last year, and includes a Foley Blvd station. The Met Council isn't going to stand up a separate project to build that for MnDOT on their own.

New Northstar Study has dropped. https://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerra ... index.html

New Northstar Study has dropped. https://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerra ... index.html

2036-2038 implementation is absolute BS


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For reference, the recently-completed (2022) I-94 expansion project from Maple Grove to Clearwater cost $350M. A separate project to fill in the gap from Albertville to Monticello will cost $101M (starting this summer).

Not to say that these Northstar estimates are cheap, but we are spending almost half a billion dollars to basically maintain service levels on an existing highway facility along the same corridor. (And, in the spirit of Northstar, the added lanes don't *quite* get to St Cloud, instead ending in Clearwater.)

New Northstar Study has dropped. https://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerra ... index.html

2036-2038 implementation is absolute BS


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Most seem to suggest a 2040 in-service date. That's just a short 16 years from now! I'm confident our train-riding president Joe Biden will be riding it on opening day while being a young 97. Wonder if he will still be an avid cyclist. Maybe he will even bring his bicycle with him. oh boy! can't wait!

Just 140,160 hours left give or take! oh boy! wonder if there is enough time for me to get my camera?

New Northstar Study has dropped. https://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerra ... index.html

2036-2038 implementation is absolute BS


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By that time it should be a full-fledged regional rail service on par with the likes of UTA's Frontrunner.

Part of me wants to wager which will happen first
the US will get true HSR first in one shape or form (i.e NEC upgrades, CAHSR, brightline west, etc) and start to make some progress after decades of trying

Or Northstar being extended 30ish miles


It's neck and neck tbh

New Northstar Study has dropped. https://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerra ... index.html

2036-2038 implementation is absolute BS


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By that time it should be a full-fledged regional rail service on par with the likes of UTA's Frontrunner.

With Minnesota's hostility to rail, I'm not holding my breath.

This almost reads to me like malicious compliance with the legislative directive. Appendix B clarifies that it's just an update of the pre-pandemic study from 2020, adding more St. Cloud service on top of the six daily Big Lake-Mpls roundtrips, all during peak am and pm hours, with all the rolling stock inefficiencies and mainline congestion that implies. That's why there's line-items in there for things like even more trainsets than the six Metro Transit has, though four of them haven't been used in years, and an expansion of the Big Lake OMF to hold them. On the one hand, it definitely is "an assessment of a project to extend Northstar Commuter Rail service to the city of St. Cloud", on the other hand, it's been pretty clear since about Sept. 2020 that prepandemic-style "lots of trips inbound in the morning, lots of trips outbound in the afternoon" commuter service wasn't going to make sense going forwards. We'll see what comes out of the secondary study due next January, which is to look at intercity transit in the MSP-St. Cloud-Fargo corridor more generally.

I'm also not holding my breath.

Better suited for the Northstar thread but anyone else think the current rolling stock doesn't fit the current service?
It be one thing if it was an actual Intercity line, but as it stands A few dmus like the flirt might make the service better with maybe keeping one of the full train sets for events

Or, a related question... how could the 5 Northstar trainsets be put to better use? Probably not for services as long as Borealis, but other services within the state?

People see Northstar's low overall ridership and think that means the trains have always been empty, but that's pretty much the opposite of the truth. It's actually been a very strong performer in terms of number of passengers per train, and held its own on that metric despite the extreme service cuts, which were probably worse here than anywhere else. There's always a freakout about how Northstar has a high subsidy per passenger, but that's driven by high operating costs and not a lack of passengers (I still have very little clue as to why their operating costs are so high, other than the fact that services contracted with the railroads tend to have inflated prices, and systems with lower service levels appear more expensive due to limited ability to spread out fixed costs).

Northstar was carrying around 230 people per train on weekdays prior to the pandemic, somewhat less if you include weekend numbers. There's a metric of "unlinked passenger trips per vehicle revenue hour (UPT per VRH)" that gets you a rough estimate of how many passengers there are per train car, though it's annoying since it is time-based rather than train-trip–based, and includes the locomotive(s) in addition to the passenger cars.

The chart on on page 19 of the post-pandemic service study showed that only Sounder commuter rail in Washington state had higher average loads among similar agencies, up at 61. Seems like 30-60 people per VRH is the norm, and Northstar was up at 55. Big systems like Metra in Chicago only averaged 40 passengers per VRH in 2019, and Metrolink in Los Angeles was 34, although they do run longer trains.

I think our schedule cuts have really prevented overall ridership from rebounding here. I don't think anywhere else had the 72% schedule cut that we did. In terms of VRH (vehicles, not counting passengers), other agencies mostly only cut around 1/3rd of trains and/or rail vehicles, and our worst peer agency only cut by half. They were all restoring service by 2022, and have pretty much gotten back to 90-100% of pre-pandemic service. It seems they're all still running standard-length trains or trains that give equivalent capacity as before, and their ridership hasn't rebounded as much as service levels yet. Still, I don't think there's any reason we couldn't be back in the 50-75% of pre-pandemic ridership that other places mostly seem to be at if we just brought the schedule back or made changes that made it more appealing.

We could make the passenger atmosphere feel normal again by restoring trains but just shorten them to 2 cars for a while. Once the passenger per VRH number gets up, start lengthening trains and adding trips.

DMUs are certainly something that should be considered for any agency, though I think we'd basically need to double service frequency in order o cancel out the reduced capacity per vehicle vs. the Bombardiers, and that would require a lot of investment in rail infrastructure. I mean, I'm all for that, though it depends on getting the funding. Call it $15 million per track mile that you want to add for sidings or a third main for much of the route up toward Big Lake or St. Cloud, and you'd probably be in the ballpark (mostly going into grading a new road bed, signals, and switches). I dunno, $500 million to $1 billion for the tracks to get a service running 15 minutes peak and pretty frequent midday/evening service, plus some other big chunk for the trains themselves? Probably something like that.

My main beef with Northstar is that its trainsets are sitting around the vast majority of the day. Seems wildly inefficient. Same goes for commuter buses, to be fair.

Yeah, only on the move for 2 hours each day on average for the pre-pandemic schedule. Now presumably up to 3.5 hours each day for the two that run (though of course they're probably rotated on a daily basis).

I made a more detailed post on the Empire Builder / Borealis thread, but I figured I should mention platform upgrades and other ADA compliance updates are apparently underway in St. Cloud or set to start soon. Hopefully that would make it easier for Northstar to use the station, since it should include a proper low-height platform, but I don't know the length or any other details.

https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/proj ... SOTA23.pdf