"Getting There" - The Hartford Line

There’s finally some good news on transportation:  a new commuter rail line, The Hartford Line, is set to open this spring.

Decades in the dreaming and years in the planning, the state-owned commuter line will run 17 trains a weekday between New Haven and Hartford, stopping at State St (New Haven), Wallingford, Meriden, Berlin and Union Station in downtown Hartford.  Twelve trains on weekdays will continue north, stopping at Windsor and Windsor Locks before ending their run in Springfield.

Parking will be free at Berlin, Wallingford and Meriden, at least until the fall.  When service expands there will be a train every 30 minutes in peak hours and every 60 minutes off-peak.  In some parts of the 62-mile run the trains will hit speeds of 110 mph, compared to the 79 mph max currently on Amtrak.

Some of the runs will use Amtrak equipment, but all trains will honor new, lower CT Rail fares.  While Amtrak currently charges as much as $47 one way from New Haven to Springfield, all trains on The Hartford Line will sell tickets for just $12.75 for the same trip.  And New Haven to Hartford will be just $8.

There will be the usual discounts for seniors, 10 trip and monthly commuters.

Those fares, coupled with free parking and a massive marketing campaign, should lure road-weary commuters off of I-91 and onto the rails.  At least that’s the hope, and there’s a lot of money riding on this plan.

Connecticut got lucky in 2011 when Florida Governor Rick Scott turned down federal money for mass transit in his state and we quickly grabbed the funding.  Millions were spent double-tracking the line and building beautiful new stations, which are hoped to be the catalyst for TOD (transit oriented development) nearby.

Also new is the railroad’s operating agency.  CDOT by-passed Amtrak (which operates Shore Line East and still owns the tracks for The Hartford Line) and went with TransItAmerica Services and Alternate Concepts, a joint venture which won the 5 year, $45 million operations contract.

Insiders tell me they’ve got a waiting list of job applicants for conductors and engineers, most of them Amtrak and Metro-North veterans fed-up with their experiences there.  The new operators promise great customer service.  Compared to Amtrak and MNRR, there’s nowhere to go but up.

One big disappointment for all concerned is that the train service will start, not with shiny new rail cars, but hand-me-down rail cars from MBTA in Massachusetts.  The original plan was that MNRR’s electric-powered M8 cars would be running on Shore Line East by now, freeing up that line’s diesel push-pulled equipment to run on the Hartford Line.  But that hasn’t happened, so CDOT went scrambling looking for railcars, which are in short supply nationally.

What they got were 16 cars, each 30 years old, which have been rehabilitated and “deep cleaned” inside and out and given FRA’s stamp of approval to run.  They’ll be fine for now and eventually The Hartford Line will get its own new railcars.

Start date was supposed to be late May, but I’d prefer they wait ‘til everything is perfect rather than rush to open “on time” and disappoint riders in any way.  Right now it looks like opening-day will be in mid-June.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media.