I know someone here has these numbers!
What is a ball park figure for the cost
per mile to construct mainline track?
How much to rip it up?
Thanks,
Dennis
The ballparked figure is 2 million a mile…your miles may vary.
For second question. A lot less.
I heard it was roughly that too- Two million a mile
last i heard it was a million per mile…if the roadbed is already in place…now i guess you can figer on a few million more per mile if your building it from scrach
csx engineer
WOW!! Thats sounds way high for track and all. But i guess once you figure in the cost of land, materials, labor, utilities, time. It probably adds up to that.
The 2 Million a mile assume there are no bridges, tunnels, cuttings or embankments
The BNSF article in Oct Trains quoted $2.2M for adding a second main line in “prairie” (no major earth moving).
Now…adding the 3rd main track through Cajon Pass…whenever they get the funding/approval to do that…will cost a bundle.
Its costs 22 million Dollers a mile to put in a extra Highway lane on I-77 in Cleveland OH,Source NOACA planning Board…Now if that same lane were put in say New Jersey It would probaly be much more and rail would look more actrative…What no one is asking here is the nightmares in voled with taking property from private landonwers
Track: Industry Basis $90-109 a track foot…(top of subgrade up)
Main Line/ New: $237+ per track foot…(top of subgrade up)
An awful lot depends on the variables…
Catenary & Signal with that? : multiply by 3.2 or more (Yes folks, non-electrified turf ain’t as cost effective as the tree huggers would have you believe…or the freight railroads would be doing it more than they have …plus they don’t buy into anything other than a very short term return on their investment)
If the 2.2mil per mile includes the cost of the real estate (as the cost given for the I-77 widening almost certainly does) it isn’t unreasonable at all. A lot more goes into creating a new line than the scraping and laying that characterize popular accounts of the Transcontinental Railroad building! Consider that some of the drainage lines and vaults might be 20 to 25’ down in the subgrade.
Nobody so far has picked up on a part of the ‘real’ cost of track that’s at least as meaningful as first cost: how much will it cost to do ongoing maintenance. A dollar spent in the right place today might save many more dollars than its ‘discounted’ equivalent. (Ask the folks on the Grimsby Subdivision!!!) This is one of the historical reasons that concrete ties, Pandrol clips, etc. are used in much new construction even though they cost… ironically, the amount of vibration and shock damage if subgrading, bridge and crossing ‘tuning’, etc aren’t done right can be much greater with concrete ties than with John Stevens-style classical wood.
As one who is on the Grimsby Sub, they should replace the entire subdivision. They need to replace all 73 or so miles plus trestles. The Stamford Sub is also another difficult one of CNs.
I never really knew how much it cost to build track, thanks yall, very infomative!
I’d say a price differential of 10:1 sounds pretty attractive to me![:D]. But then, I’m a railroad guy at heart… then add to that the capacity differences (as very rough figures: for passenger travel, somewhere around 1500 people per lane mile per hour or 30,000 tons of freight per lane mile per hour for a highway, vs. easily four times that for a rail line)…
Oh well.
Be very careful when assuming there is an objective difference here. Where is the section of I-77 being widened, and are there things like sound barriers involved in the construction? There is, in fact, quite a bit of available economic data for both new highway construction (!-287, I-78) and lane widenings (name your Interstate in the northern part of the state) in New Jersey – I was there for a number of the projects. You can’t compare straight construction costs for, say, the Paterson part of I-80 or the Pennsylvania end of I-78, which involve heroic civil engineering, with a lane addition in Cleveland, but I can tell you this: grading the same route-miles for practical railroad service might have involved similar, perhaps even greater grading and slope-stabilization cost. The number of practical ‘route-pairs’ for commuters in Northern New Jersey is staggering – even with extensive (and extensively subsidized!) commuter rail service on a wide variety of routes – and the effective utility of an added highway lane which is available 24/7 to open traffic is substantially greater than a dedicated ROW over which movements are only practical by private railroad companies acting as common carriers, or by state-subsidized entities. There is no practical way to take the equivalent of “1500 people per lane-mile” and move that directly onto rail; you have to provide parking, etc., and then run trains that are proportional to that demand. Note that this happens nowhere in the area, and congestion is a debilitating influence on trip times only part of the day. Building whole new rail lines that only see effective traffic for three to four hours per day each way – in a market that already can’t “pay” capitalization charges to improve legacy ROWs out of its own revenues – isn’t nearly as effective as feeders to toll crossings… there’s a long, long history at the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey.
Sorry about this somewhat long digression from the Cleveland topic – think about what a rail alt
Overmod – that’s what I deserve for simple-minded responses to topics… thanks![:)]
Of course the economics of the whole thing are a lot more involved than simple construction costs; if they weren’t, the tradeoff would be kind of a no-brainer. It seems to me that, in fact, there really are two quite different sets of economic (and dare I say it political[xx(]) questions involved: movement of freight, and movement of people. The Cleveland example on which we have all been happily bashing is, basically, a people-mover problem – and we have seen in many many different threads that the people-mover aspect of railroading gets pretty wild, both economically and politically[:(]. Overmod is quite right in pointing out that you can’t simply take the capacity per lane of people and expect them all to ride the rails; they simply won’t, unless there is no alternative – and, for reasons which baffle me completely (maybe that’s why I’m an engineer, not a politician[:D]) the GP would prefer to sit in a miles long traffic jam than take public transit.
Moving freight, however, is a somewhat different consideration, and the economics are much clearer – and the politics much less messy (although they get into it). For the sake of illustration, I refer back to a study which I did some years ago now for a project (which didn’t fly, for political reasons[xx(]). Background: There is a considerable amount of freight which moves by truck between the northern New Jersey/eastern Pennsylvania area to the southern New England area; a good bit of it is coming from or goint to further south, and use I-81. (road map time![:o)]). While there is a passenger rail connection through New York City, the farthest south freight connection is the Hudson River Bridge at Castleton on Hudson, on the old B&A main line east from Selkirk yards. However, there used to be a bridge at Poughkeepsie; the bridge is still there, but needs a lot of work to be usable. The study was a comparison of the cost of rehabilitation of that bridge an
How much do you figure it cost for a bridge per feet or what ever the rate is? How much does it cost roughly to elevate the track by bridge or landscaping?
Elevating by landscaping (I presume you mean by fill, as in the approaches to a flyover?) isn’t that bad – it’s just another fill, after all, unless you have to buy a whole lot of fill material (usually we try to balance cut and fill over a reasonably short distance on a job)(well, we try…[:)]). For trestle work or any kind of significant bridge, I wouldn’t be able to give a per foot figure, since it varies so much on how long, foundation conditions, and all that sort of thing. Maybe someone has a number? I don’t have the figures for the flyovers recently constructed by or for BNSF on the transcon; maybe mudchicken can enlighten us?
On the Poughkeepsie bridge, we were just rehabbing the bridge – new ties and track, mostly, and some new steel in the top chords where it was fire damaged. A new bridge at that location would be … I don’t even want to know. There is a good reason why there are only 10 (I think – I have trouble counting) bridges over the Hudson, counting both highway and rail, between the ocean and Albany – 130 miles of some of the densest population in the country.
There was an article this week in USA Today about how major employers in suburban areas, in order to attract top people, are starting to support the development of housing and services adjacent to their office buildings and parks. These employees aren’t interested in using their time commuting and otherwise being in traffic. They are health conscious, and see value in walking. Perhaps this is what tomorrow’s cities will look like, resulting in a reduction in need for costly transportation construction, operation, and maintenance.
WOW!, that much? How long is this bridge though?