Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade
Where does this become lethal for Track 61? Not because it's such a pain to retrofit for dual wheel profiles. That's pretty simple. It's the limited scale that kills it, on account of Track 61 already being a niche prospect before even counting up the whittling-down effects.
- Dual-profile wheel retrofits are probably too much to ask for on the fragile 75-year-old PCC fleet (per Ari's blog suggestion for fleet reassignment).
- The Type 7's just came back from rebuild with all-new trucks under parts & service warranty for 10 more years. Going 'off- instruction manual' with new kludges--whether fully feasible or not--is not going to be kosher with the warranty they need to keep those brand new parts serviceable for the 10-15 years those vehicles have to remain a backbone fleet.
- LOL! on running the Bredas in any situation that could ever make them derail more often than they already do.
- Setting aside 6 out of 200+ cars to maintain with different wheel sets runs into the same problem as setting aside 10 old-timey PCC's in a modern fleet of 200+ cars. The maint scale is terrible, and an agency with dire staffing problems can't maintain enough people's qualifications for those components to get the Track 61 fleet promptly repaired. If keeping the PCC's long-term at all requires them to be gutted/rebuilt as fully orthodox and modern under the hood, then uncorking another component fragmentmentation instance in an even more niche setting flunks the cost-benefit test even worse than Mattapan.
- Interlining. Will never ever happen between Track 61 and the Green Line, so all your dreams of planting the flag here as a placeholder first then stringing together something grander are for naught. We already have enough LRV design quirks forced by the 1897 Central Subway that there's no way dual-profile wheels across the whole system are ever going to be thrown in as the cherry on top of all the other quirks that contort fleet design costs. Track 61 is nowhere near value-added enough to do battle with that dragon on a new front. There's a very good reason that Urban Ring Phase II LRT concepts throw trolley tracks in the Haul Road in mixed truck traffic instead of widening the freight reservation. Note also this is the exact reason why any LRT hybridization of the Grand Junction through Cambridge is verboten until you completely remove the branch from the FRA rail network...no can do there from the Central Subway.
- Freight & freight legalities. CSX still retains freight rights the full length of Track 61, and cannot be pressured or compelled to give them up against its will per about 2 centuries of interstate commerce law. Massport also has fully articulated plans to build out mission-critical port rail service to Marine Terminal after the Harbor is dredged for PanMax ships, with CSX already agreeing to serve it on a daily overnight out of Readville if Massport produces the business. Unlike those 4 blocks of Newark Light Rail trolley track that Norfolk Southern traverses couple times a week to switch one local customer with 3 or 4 cars, 1.5 miles of Track 61 every night handling 20+ car multimodal loads at an international shipping terminal with Customs and insurance processing is not going to be red-tape kosher. There is literally nothing the City or any local biz interest could offer these players in indemnification to make it worth their while for the freights to take on 100% of the maint and derailment risk. They all (but none more than CSX) crap bigger'n City of Boston. Stop any abject fantasies of "Aww, be a friend!" altruism on their part before they even form in one's head, because the whole history of interstate commerce says otherwise.
The scale just doesn't come close to overcoming the hurdles. Casting lonely eyes to Track 61 in the first place is itself in exercise in niche-fitting when you're nearly out of options to begin with, so it's already a narrow and low-odds target to have to thread to find a cost-benefit valuation that doesn't get upended by very small/chintzy things. Wheel profile is not a showstopper at any real-world technical level. Very much not so; it doesn't take some Rube Goldberg device to do that. But it is just enough a showstopper on scale for the microscopic operating margins Track 61 service has to live inside of a very vast rapid transit system to make that sort of spot customization any sort of value-added. Especially when interlining with the Green Line is a forever-impossible.
And that's in a nutshell the selection-bias problem of chasing niches in the first place, and why Track 61 is such an outsized frustration/obsession for planners. It seems so simple in concept that there MUST be a way to pull it off, therefore we should keep digging in with a new annual proposal that passes the Shirley Leung smell test! But with niche margins like that the chintzy things are the showstoppers that make it operate as an off-scale loss leader no sane person would spend money on over other priorities. Once it's run afoul of its margins with a couple chintzy demerits like wheel profile fragmenting the equipment pool and forever ruling out interlining...building it at all becomes more a battle of "Oh, yeah! I'll show 'em!" spite than solving problems. Maybe that's acceptable in the vacuum of the Crazy Transit Pitches thread, but when the lack of a Silver Line Phase III replacement build is the pants-shitting threat that may level off the Seaport's growth prematurely...in the real world overpaying for limited functionality on the narrowest of niches as distraction to the big problem is going to get deep-pocketed interests out for these distracted pols' and planners' scalps. i.e. "Why aren't we doing the thing that matters
most 'to say you can' instead of this???"
Same promise dashed as running a piggish DMU dinky through Amtrak's backyard. Yeah, it works in concept. Yeah, it's semi-useful. No...it's a godawful loss leader and wretched use of fleet resources for what impossibly narrow fare recovery target it takes to make it justify its existence. We probed that already. Now we're just substituting different modes and flailing at things like "maybe there's a thousand riders living under a rock in Hyde Park who can appear out of nowhere." Same blockers hit from different angles.
Unfortunately, we've kind of established the predictive value of trying 10 more new angles for trying to make 61 a 'thing'...and they're all just as unfavorable. We've already taken our best shot at pegging best value proposition for 61, and it's just never better than borderline-leaning-unfavorable. The danger now is simply that the City/BCEC just become ever more obsessive about coming at it again and again and again with the same repackaged pitch until the distraction starts to sideline the rest of the Seaport transpo improvements universe. Like I said last page...it is entirely within the City's own independent means to make some phone calls about a for-cheap private LMA shuttle trial next year using Haul Road on this same alignment, where they can make a case for state aid rooted in actual ridership from the trial. Starts to become hypocritical to obsess about loss-leader 61 proposals that can't be done in this political environment inside this crippled agency in under 7-10 years when that burnt bandwidth leaves more mundane, self-starting options on the table. Can't let niche-chasing run amok or the distorting effects start to become their own form of paralysis. We've seen that happen in some Crazy Transit Pitches grudge matches; we don't need it breaking out inside of Walsh's office.
