I had wondered if the Readville layover was going to pull the Allston layover off the table, and it has.
Further
Comm Mag reading on that subject:
https://commonwealthmagazine.org/tr...ds-with-earlier-statements-by-pollack-poftak/
The wordplay of calling the BP layover a "maintenance facility" always reeked to high heaven. Of all the potential southside sites for a Vehicle Maint Facility, Readville was hands-down the best location for that. VMF plant and Maintenance-of-Way bases don't have to be extreme-close to the CBD like layover storage, only sorta close and with multiple access points in case of emergency. Readville's a genuinely great location for VMF functions with co-equal access to the Fairmount, NEC, and Franklin mains for routing redundancy, lots of easy sound-abatement land to expand on next to the Neponset, and lower freight rates for passing new and/or repair car setoffs via CSX at the freight yard literally next door (cheaper to fetch from a yard setoff than pay handling fees to have Pan Am local job BO-1 directly switch Boston Engine Terminal while they're puttering in Somerville). The Beacon Park site would've been acreage-poor, a bit access-constrained by truck in the midst of all that ramp spaghetti, tethered to only 2 B&A tracks to South Station for some degree of ops fragility when triaging heavily disabled trains around, and probably more costly to run since the equipment setoffs are comparably harder to stage there with the lack of any adjacent freight schedules.
As a pure-layover site, Beacon Park was better than Readville by being closer to South Station...not as good as Widett because it was over-dependent on just 2 B&A tracks thru Downtown for deadheading sets to/from the terminal, but something worth reserving their easement for in case the politics of layover land usage became a total shitshow (which they of course did). It made some sense at the conceptual level for pure storage. But they opted not to hold all cards for even pure storage...unilaterally busting down the layover capacity (cut from 13 trainsets to 8) to make it less useful by half, and telegraphing all along that they were under enormous pressure from Harvard to zero-out the rest of the land. Then they started circulating those total garbage renders of West Station being inverted-placement from the layover, making everyone wonder how in the everloving hell that station was going to be of any walkup use to either side (but moreso BU) with it being so bunkered into the middle of such very car-centric street grid. And then the total dissonance about the not-useful-enough shrunken layover being repurposed as a WAY less-useful maint facility.
It began to resemble an argumentative ploy by Pollack/Poftak for reasons
???????. Clearly they saw some benefit in running that interference with People's Pike + other advocates for the 'Throat' cripple-fight. Though don't ask me to attempt to explain what the hell benefit they saw in running that VMF interference, because it makes no rational sense to anything and clearly the new regime immediately saw fit to pivot away from it. Probably a not-insignificant miscalculation on their part...or, Pollack was just too burnt out to fake pretending the game was anything other than "trollollollollol". The outside design study the T commissioned to craft a maint facility site plan was always gonna bullseye Readville for those functions, regardless of the still-undecided fortunes for the layover siting (still nobody's done deal given the ongoing farce at Widett). It's entirely possible that the goalposts-moving games on public display for the last year-plus were just the festering public signs that Pollack had completely lost the plot as a leader and needed quite badly to go. If that's what evidence the project postmortem uncovers, I'll totally believe it. She had absolutely turned into one of the chief impediments to progress, and it was starting to show across-board rather gruesomely...many places, not just here.
What I'd like to see
coincident with whatever credence this VMF decision lends to un-sticking the 'Throat' politics is:
- an immediately less self-alienating redesign of the West Station complex
- ...that in turn forces a re-design of the very problematic new street grid surrounding it
Just zero-out the layover altogether. At only 8 trainsets in its currently much-reduced form, it flat-out ain't useful enough for what it does. It's over-expensive tokenism. Readville is still very distance-poor as layover (but as described is
excellent as a VMF location), but the land is plentiful...straight to the banks of the Neponset if they displace the recycling center easement next door. It makes up for its layover ops demerits in sheer capacity and by being fully integrated (like Boston Engine Terminal up north) with its VMF component. And the T controls the land without pressure from extremely unreliable partners, which you can't say for Beacon Park. If the Widett developer+BDPA shitshow places the "Mommy, help" call to MassDOT they might still get the ideal-location day storage yard all the same. But Beacon Park would still need an 80%+ buildout of Readville for storage, so what's the point for its relative anti-usefulness. Readville can...with some sub-optimal ops concessions...handle the full job, and have better cost consolidation vs. splitting its functions with whatever layover tokenism they could've wrung out of BP.
There's no reason now not to acknowledge reality and proceed with zeroing-out the rest of the BP layover land. Doing so immediately re-drafts West Station's problematic self-alienating design, and probably de-isolates it enormously from the BU side. They still have shitloads of additional redesign work to do trying to debug that chunky, car-overcentric, very anti-useful looking street grid. De-inverting West's placement ups its potential toplines, and probably saves some considerable cost in the process because it'll have more land to use and no longer any need to cram its busways up on hilariously overdesigned decking stilts. But if the process of de-inverting West forces a re-look at that problematic and very afterthought-looking street grid, more power to 'em. Might be just the kick-in-pants the doctor ordered for addressing all the distress signals the developable slab was giving off on access and supportable density.
If this was truly the work of 1-2 obstinate trolls who'd overstayed their welcome...hooray. The air's already been cleansed somewhat by acknowledging what's long been obvious. The dominoes around West's access, the street grid, etc. then fall accordingly...all things I was generally way more big-picture concerned about than the 'Throat' solution hair-splitting du jour.
