Well, I do want to just say this first: I'm also fairly confident that I know what I'm talking about, and that's not because of who I may or may not have worked for. I'm confident because I know that the math and the public records and the best practices adopted here and abroad and the lessons we've learned over more than 200 years about how to run a railroad all bear out my arguments and so I will stand behind them. I'm not afraid to be wrong, though I don't think I am, and I'm not afraid to adjust course when new information becomes available. If I make the case and someone else makes a better case with better evidence, that's great! But if I ever have to fall back on who I am and not what I can demonstrate as a matter of public record, then that's when I've failed.
And perhaps it's a character flaw of mine but I am never afraid to look anybody or any organization in the eye and say "I believe that you believe that, but you're wrong."
Imagineer, I'll address the major points of your post now, and I believe that Brightline believes (and has adopted internal policies which reflect those beliefs and operationally structures itself following those policies and has internal discussions amongst its staff informed by those beliefs) in what you're saying here.
But they're wrong. And you don't need to trust me on that, you can trust in the evidence to demonstrate that they are wrong.
Stops less than two minute are possible for some trains, sure, but Brightline trains will have too many passengers unloading and loading at each station for this to be feasible. Yes, it could potentially happen for a lighter passenger load, but it will never be scheduled for less than this. In fact, the dwell time will likely be more than two minutes.
My choice of pointing at the Acela was very intentional. It is, generally speaking, meaningfully the same product as Brightline. It is a higher-speed intercity train connecting business and leisure travelers between three intensely popular destinations in NYC, PHI, and DC, with several intermediate and lower-intensity station stops. Brightline is a higher-speed intercity train that will be connecting business and leisure travelers between three intensely popular destinations in TPA, MCO, and MIA, with several intermediate and lower-intensity station stops. The trains themselves are different. The tracks they run on are different. But the experience of getting on and off that platform while the train is stopped there is, in every meaningful sense, the same. Amtrak's figured out how to get it done in under 60 seconds and was doing that for 19 years before, you know, the thing that happened. Brightline does not need to hire consultants from rail operators that do it every day in Japan or Europe to figure out how to routinely get 100 people on and off a train at a second-string station in 60 seconds. They probably don't even need to hire consultants from Amtrak to figure it out. It can be done, easily. Whether they want to or not is a different conversation - and to be clear, if they
don't want to, they're sandbagging.
Additionally, stops cannot be skipped as easily as Amtrak can on the NEC. The NEC has at least double track all the way through, with station sites typically having even more sidings. Brightline has long sections of single track, so the trains have to be timed in each direction so they are not forced to stop and wait for one another. If trains only stop at some stations part of the time, these meeting points will have too much fluctuation to adequately design a system. A better comparison is Amtrak's long haul routes, which operate on long segments of single track as well and have poor coordination with freight trains in the other direction, resulting in long delays of trains waiting on sidings for the other to pass (Google Amtrak's long haul on time performance).
Brightline's designs for the brand-new track that they're laying west from MCO indicate an all or nearly all double-tracked right of way. Whether Brightline builds the second track the whole way has no impact on having provisioned for it (and frankly, with the land being the most expensive part of laying down rail, if they have the provision not building is very pound-foolish.) Additionally, 15% design documentation suggests additional sidings for Sunrail trains to separate them from Brightline, and that every Brightline station has a minimum of two platformed tracks. In other words, there's going to be more than enough room to pass trains safely when and as needed. And with a crew change extended layover virtually guaranteed for MCO Station because that's where it makes operational sense to have it, it makes sense to control and dispatch MCO-West separate from MCO-East. Fortunate, since MCO-West by nature of being double-tracked and separated from non-passenger rail can support a much higher level of service. Again, I believe that they believe that the presence of long single-tracked segments on the shared freight portion of the line in southern FL prevent them from fully utilizing the tracks hundreds of route-miles away in central FL, but they're wrong.
The math works in theory, but it is not practical. A train will never accelerate and decelerate to always achieve its maximum operating speed because it is not efficient and not as comfortable for riders. Example: If there is a 30 mph curve, followed by a 100 mph straightaway, followed by another 30 mph curve within the next 1/2 mile, the train will likely stick at 30 mph all the way through or perhaps only increase slightly for the middle section. This also means that even though a route may appear less hilly or curvy overall, the placement of these slower sections relative to one another can make the route actually slower. I will add that the travel time between the two routes with no intermediate stops is pretty close, but a 528 alignment would mean that an I-Drive station exists, and because a stop would be added every time for the reasons I stated earlier, the travel time is much higher.
It's true that maximum operating speed isn't always achievable and that trains won't accelerate to maximum speed if they will then have to immediately begin decelerating. But, even leaving aside that it still is and remains operationally trivial to bypass OCCC thus removing it from consideration, we can turn back to the math to figure out how many meters of route is needed for the acceleration and we can then look at the route map to see how many route-km of top speed that sill leaves before the next deceleration point to determine if it's "worth it" to speed up or not. That formula is easy: distance traveled is equal to initial velocity multiplied by time, plus half the acceleration rate multiplied by time squared. We have all those numbers already - 54 seconds at 1.03 m/s^2 with a starting speed of 0 - and we can find that the train will have traveled just over 1.5 km from the moment it begins rolling out of OCCC until the moment it hits top speed.
It won't hit top speed heading west because it hits the curve into the I-4 median at around the 1 km mark and 44 seconds into the acceleration run; I don't have the projected speed limit on that curve - just because there's still a lot of wiggle room as to what the precise radius even ends up at - but suffice to say it's not going to be 200 kmph. It
might be 160 - conveniently, that's just about the speed that would be reached after 44 seconds of acceleration out of OCCC, which would mean that the real time penalty imposed by OCCC on the leg between it and the curve is just 44 seconds for the 0-160 plus an additional 10 seconds for the time it would've taken to go 160-200 over that stretch of track instead. 54 seconds total. Even if it's a 50 kph curve as I might choose to infer from your choice of example number, however, that just means that it's instead a 13.5 second penalty for 0-50 acceleration (which with the distance traveled while accelerating formula can be shown to take 93.85 meters) and then another 65.24 second penalty representing traveling the other 900~ meters at reduced speed plus a further 40.45 second penalty for not going 50-200 instead. That's a total of 119.19 seconds (let's call it 2 minutes) and requires some egregiously tight curvature, beyond what I would reasonably expect to see.
It will most likely hit top speed heading east - even the most pessimistic napkin estimation of the curvature immediately east of OCCC has no speed penalty and everything else is straighter in comparison. (1.5 km puts us about halfway between Universal Blvd and John Young Pkwy, for those curious.) That means we can just take the 54 second figure for acceleration time penalty and move on to figuring out how much running room we have at top speed. Well, the next problematic curve is of course the one we would need to turn onto the Sunrail tracks with. The current plans suggest a very aggressive right-angle turn which would be a definite 50 kmph turn, even though there's plenty of room to widen the curve radius to something that can be handled at higher speeds. Regardless, the 40.45 seconds we need to decelerate down to 50 gives us a deceleration run about 1.4km long, which means if we start decelerating around where General Drive is, we'll be at the desired speed in time for the approximate start of the turn. That's more than 4 km away from the run up to OCCC station - more than both runs combined by far and more than enough to make it worth it to hit top speed for 90 seconds or so. In other words, we can disregard everything east of OCCC as being time-neutral.
54 seconds, plus 60 seconds of station dwell time, plus somewhere between 54 seconds and 2 minutes. Total penalty from OCCC existing: between 2 minutes 48 seconds and 3 minutes 54 seconds depending on the situation immediately west of the station. Brightline needs to take at least an extra two minutes sandbagging on the platform to get the stop penalty up to 6 minutes where it might start meaningfully impacting travel choices (frankly I don't think the average rider of Brightline is going to notice even then since there wouldn't be an entire second different Brightline route operating for them to compare to, and we've got to try much harder than this to throw the comparison race vs driving), at which point, the obvious thing to do to reduce travel times cheaply is to
stop sandbagging.
And yes, the designs are only 15%. There's a lot of studying left to do. We've got a long, long way to go. But 15% isn't 0. 15% is enough to give us an idea, a solid jumping off point to make calculations and inform decisions and as we move past 15% use those figures to improve the plan. I'm not taking anything as gospel. I'm open to adjustments. Are they?
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