Study Overview
The North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA) is pleased to announce a major new freight planning initiative – the Rail Freight Capacity and Needs Assessment to Year 2040.
Freight issues are extremely important in the NJTPA planning region, which includes thirteen counties in Northern New Jersey. The region hosts: the Port of New York and New Jersey, one of the nation’s top three ports on the basis of tonnage and containers; heavily-used local, regional, and interstate truck corridors and crossings; heavy concentrations of intermodal and non-intermodal rail activity; significant national and international air cargo facilities; and hundreds of millions of square feet of warehouse/distribution space. These networks and facilities are essential to the economic and transportation well-being of 6 million residents in the NJTPA region and 20 million in the NY/NJ metropolitan statistical area, along with uncounted regional businesses. Understanding the effects and importance of freight is therefore critical – not only to ensure the accuracy of the regional transportation planning process, but also to effectively communicate the importance of freight to the region’s freight stakeholders, businesses, communities, residents, and funding decision-makers.
The primary focus of this study shall be the NJTPA Region’s major freight Corridor Lines as follows: CSX River Line, Conrail Northern Branch, P&H Branch, Conrail Lehigh Line, Norfolk Southern Lehigh Line, and CSX West Trenton Line. The freight mainlines along with connecting trackage owned or operated by the major Class I railroads or regional shortline railroads shall be examined as an integrated network under both current conditions and future operating scenarios determining its adequacy and identifying potential upgrades and improvements needed to enable the system to meet projected future freight and passenger demands.
The project will take twelve months and is being conducted for NJTPA by a consultant team of HDR Engineering, Inc. with Cheng Solutions LLC, and Egan Consulting Group. Key work tasks include:
- An inventory of current rail system conditions.
- Development of rail demand forecasts for both freight and passenger rail for the Corridor Lines in the NJTPA region.
- Identification of potential constraints in the Corridor Lines.
- An assessment of the feasibility of new freight/passenger rail corridors.
- An evaluation of potential capacity improvements that can be made in the Corridor Lines
- Public outreach effort to gain a better understanding of rail capacity issues facing stakeholders and communities in the NJTPA region.
For further information on this project, please contact Dave Dawson, NJTPA Project Manager at 973-639-8432 or DDawson@njtpa.org.