Secondary Stops in Cities on Intercity Rail | Pedestrian Observations

Intercity trains usually only call at the main cities, and only at their main stations. However, in some cases, they make more than one stop in the same city. Examples include the Northeast Corridor with its two Boston stops, the Shinkansen stopping at Shinagawa and Ueno each a few kilometers out of Tokyo Station, Israel Railways with every train stopping multiple times in Tel Aviv, and ICEs stopping not just at Berlin Hauptbahnhof but also a station in each of the cardinal directions out of the city. This practice is a useful tool in the kit of an intercity rail planner, but is not always appropriate – indeed, anti-examples exist throughout France where this never happens and in most German cities that are not Berlin. The goal of this post is to discuss when it is or isn’t appropriate.

Opposite-side stops

If a city is at the end of a line, then the train may continue shortly past it and serve a secondary center. The main examples are in Berlin: it is at the northeastern end of the country, so trains running north-south either run through northwest to Hamburg or terminate just north of Hauptbahnhof at Gesundbrunnen, and trains running east-west entering Hauptbahnhof on the Stadtbahn run through to Ostbahnhof. This is not done in the other examples I have in mind: Israeli trains run through Tel Aviv, Shinkansen terminate at Tokyo Station rather than continuing to the opposite side, and the Northeast Corridor terminates at Washington Union Station rather than continuing one stop south to Alexandria.

In all cases, the question of whether to do it hinges on infrastructure more than operations. Unlike near-side stops, nobody is being delayed by the extra stop – Ostbahnhof isn’t between Hauptbahnhof and anything except Poland, which is barely even peripheral to the German rail network. The main cost is the extra few minutes of train operating time, on which ridership is necessarily going to be lower than the average because most people will have gotten off at the primary station. Whether it’s worth it depends on where it’s easier to turn, based on specific infrastructure considerations.

In Berlin, the reason for Ostbahnhof, a station with no connections to any public transport except the Stadtbahn, which also serves Hauptbahnhof, is infrastructural. The station has one more track than Hauptbahnhof (five vs. four on the mainline Stadtbahn tracks); more importantly, the railyard is to the east of the station, so any ICE using the Stadtbahn has to travel via Ostbahnhof anyway, so it might as well stop there. The railyard is also why some east-west trains even use the Stadtbahn with its 60 km/h speed limits to begin with, when those trains entering from the west can divert to the faster North-South Main Line.

In contrast, the Northeast Corridor’s electrification ends at Washington Union Station. In theory, it can be wired to Virginia and some trains can continue to Arlington while still running under wire. In practice, other works are involved – Washington Union Station is a mix of through- and terminating tracks and so far the through-tracks are low-platform, and the only bridge on the Potomac is primarily used by freight and a separate bridge to allow for passenger-dedicated infrastructure is under construction but won’t open until 2030.

Distance from the primary station

The farther away a node is from the primary station, the more appropriate it is as a prospect for a near-side station, because it is less likely to share a travel market with the primary station, and the cost to travelers of backtracking is higher. In a number of cases, it’s debatable whether the station should even properly count as a secondary station in the city, as opposed to a separate city’s stop. In New York, for example, the nearest station to Penn Station is Newark, 16 km away, in a city center that evolved separately and only became part of the New York metro area in the 20th century, long after its location as a station was established.

I emphasize that this logic is only for near-side stations, because for far-side stations, the logic goes in the exact opposite direction: the train is necessarily emptier going past the last primary city on the route, so the longer it has to run relatively empty, the weaker the idea of serving the far-side stop is. Not for nothing, Ostbahnhof and Gesundbrunnen are both very close to Hauptbahnhof, both well within the city center urban fabric.

To return to the case of New York, this is what separates Newark from Long Island City. There is currently no serviceable station in Queens on the Northeast Corridor, but there are occasional plans to build on, either at Queens Boulevard or a bit farther east at what I (and people following me) call Sunnyside Junction to allow for a transfer to East Side Access trains to Grand Central (the map below calls it Harold after the interlocking). MTA plans have called for the former, and...