Regional Rail (RUR) & North-South Rail Link (NSRL)

CSTH said:
If you really want to impress me, route this to Worcester via GJ with a stop in Kendall...
Click to expand...

It's on one of the slides for the fuller/costlier builds. WOR-NS does have an official study in-hand, though they'd have to re-factor the headways for bi-directional instead of peak-only. Full-on RER frequencies are very unlikely, though, because of slow curve- and terminal district-limited speeds keeping total throughput lower than 15 (or even 30) min. bi-directional headways...and grade crossing impacts that are very severe for road traffic.

It's fungible for some meaningful service, though, so they may be able to fold it in as a cog in a "pan-Worcester" RER strategy. Just don't expect anything truly load-bearing assigned to that route.
 
Any proposal for RER that utilizes the Grand Junction will cause the population of East Cambridge to generate enough bricks to make a proper Beacon Hill sidewalk around the equator.
 
RandomWalk said:
Any proposal for RER that utilizes the Grand Junction will cause the population of East Cambridge to generate enough bricks to make a proper Beacon Hill sidewalk around the equator.
Click to expand...

The exercise could be useful, however, for hastening another look at the Urban Ring NW quadrant. Simply because you can't sustain 15-min. bidirectional frequencies with an intermediate stop on that line under RR mode where the curves, crossing impacts, and northside terminal district approach all degrade performance to well below that service target. A simple re-benchmarking of modes vs. target frequencies is going to highlight the service difference that can't be made up as RER but very much can on LRT/BRT...where some crossing eliminations are possible, other crossings can share traffic signal cycles, denser stop spacing is possible, and traversing the slow-speed north terminal district is a non-factor.

And failing that, *some* TBD degree of WOR-NS service is desirable even if it's sub-RER level. They just have to sell it as a cog in a greater B&A RER strategy, is all. It's improbable that every last destination-specific frequency target systemwide can be achieved absolutely 'pure', uncompromised, and within realistic costs. Some shape-shifting and give-and-take around individual chokepoints is going to be necessary to fashion an overall equitable system. Grand Junction is one such example where you try to use it for every service ounce it's worth because it is unquestionably net-positive useful, but don't get bogged down in perfectionism because *good* is achievable while *perfect* objectively is not.
 
RandomWalk said:
Any proposal for RER that utilizes the Grand Junction will cause the population of East Cambridge to generate enough bricks to make a proper Beacon Hill sidewalk around the equator.
Click to expand...
I think the key is to engage with some kind of station stop and guarantees of quiet zones (instead of today's horns), and to make them think that the idea came from them, or the neighbors near Central Sq & Kendall Sq.

The problem last time was in part that it seemed like Worcester ramming trains through their neighborhood, rather than something that they could benefit from too.
 
How hard would it be to cut and cover the grand junction if you wanted to run some sort of rapid transit through it
 
Mongo said:
How hard would it be to cut and cover the grand junction if you wanted to run some sort of rapid transit through it
Click to expand...

You can't really because you need it for diesel train movement. Even in a world where the Link exists it's likely there's going to be diesel trains still being used for some time.
 
Mongo said:
How hard would it be to cut and cover the grand junction if you wanted to run some sort of rapid transit through it
Click to expand...

Probably up to 40-50% as costly as the whole NSRL package...i.e. heee-lariously not worth it.

  • BU Bridge to Main St. the ROW is in 1905 landfill. In the 19th century the line ran about 100 ft. out into the bay on a causeway; the present-day ROW is literally the oldest man-made structure in Charles Basin. The waterproofing costs for running anything subterranean here are astronomical.

  • Area around Binney St. is 1968-71 landfill of old Broad Canal, which terminated in Kendall and featured a barge-to-rail transload. There used to be a rail drawbridge here. Single-point waterproofing challenge, since the ex-Canal fill is still influenced by water levels in Charles Basin.

  • The Red Line tunnel under Main St. would have to be underpinned, meaning a continuous descent from Cambridgeport into a deep-bore tunnel...blowing out the waterproofing cost some more. Because now you have to install an armada of active pump rooms in the vicinity of Main to prevent the storm-drain effect from a Charles Basin breach in the GJ tunnel from catastrophically breaching the bedrock-anchored and otherwise high-and-dry Red tunnel. Also, don't forget to factor a cost blowout for vent shafts and active exhaust fans in a deep dunnel for diesel co-usage.

  • It's also going to be slow as hell, since the tunnel still has to conform to the very sharp curve at Main St. Possibly slower than today if the tunnel is still inclining very close to the Main curve.

In short, you could not only build the Urban Ring NW quadrant as a Green Line Lechmere-Kenmore radial for many billions less and net vastly better headways...but you could probably build the entire Urban Ring all around for what it would cost to force-fit a rather poor-performing and unusually high-maintenance RR tunnel through here.

You either make do with the line as a useful but limited piece of the pie, or it lights a fire under getting the UR done using a more appropriate mode for the corridor. None of the Civil Engineering Strongman solutions for trying to make it a less- shitty-performing RR can hold a candle to just getting the UR mode change over with.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Probably up to 40-50% as costly as the whole NSRL package...i.e. heee-lariously not worth it.

  • BU Bridge to Main St. the ROW is in 1905 landfill. In the 19th century the line ran about 100 ft. out into the bay on a causeway; the present-day ROW is literally the oldest man-made structure in Charles Basin. The waterproofing costs for running anything subterranean here are astronomical.

  • Area around Binney St. is 1968-71 landfill of old Broad Canal, which terminated in Kendall and featured a barge-to-rail transload. There used to be a rail drawbridge here. Single-point waterproofing challenge, since the ex-Canal fill is still influenced by water levels in Charles Basin.
....
Click to expand...

At the risk of picking nits...isn't there something like a ceiling (pardon the pun)on tunnel waterproofing costs? I know its high (i.e. expensive to do it in a place like here) but its not unlimited, right?

Like, if you're digging in wet sloppy muck, you have to pay for high performance membranes etc. But if the muck is really really sloppy and wicked fucking wet (and extra fucking mucky) ... its the still just same membranes right?

I'm familiar with the history of the area...but I'm surprised by the notion that waterproofing a tunnel (or a basement, for that matter) is meaningfully more problematic here than it is in any of the other 100+year old filled tidal flats in Boston.
 
CSTH said:
At the risk of picking nits...isn't there something like a ceiling (pardon the pun)on tunnel waterproofing costs? I know its high (i.e. expensive to do it in a place like here) but its not unlimited, right?

Like, if you're digging in wet sloppy muck, you have to pay for high performance membranes etc. But if the muck is really really sloppy and wicked fucking wet (and extra fucking mucky) ... its the still just same membranes right?

I'm familiar with the history of the area...but I'm surprised by the notion that waterproofing a tunnel (or a basement, for that matter) is meaningfully more problematic here than it is in any of the other 100+year old filled tidal flats in Boston.
Click to expand...

The flood map is...rather ungood...for Cambridgeport. But here's why it's doubleplus problematic. . .

The one saving grace for the Red Line is that the Kendall portal is very high above natural ground because of the Longfellow Bridge approach. The block around Kendall Station is a risk zone, but Red quickly exits any trouble by hitting ancestral terra firma soon after Kendall en route to Central. With current configuration, the absolute worst you'd have to provision for is leakage down the station stairs.

Any Grand Junction burial would have to portal soon after coming off the BU Railroad Bridge in order to get down under Mass Ave. on a steady descent that will allow it to slip deep enough under Red by the time it reaches Main St. The bridge is only a few feet above the riverbanks, with the tracks under Memorial Drive flooding out frequently when the river crests. The doomsday scenario is a breach at the portal very near this low and flood-prone riverbank, where the 2/3-to-3/4 mile steady downward grade makes the flow of water ever-more difficult to stop. And then it all pools at bottom grade immediately below the Red Line tunnel where it can breach the upper level. That's playing with a loaded gun if one breach on one line has the potential to KO two of Cambridge's trunklines for months.

Our reference point for bad portal flooding is the D Line portal. But that's a very steep incline that levels out fast, so with the pump room upgrades after the '96 flood they can backstop stop a breach of the flood barrier before the channel of water reaches Kenmore. That's much harder to do on a very long downgrade, and you will probably need multiple barriers and active pumping to manage the risk. Note that flood-proofing the NEC portal for NSRL is going to require a lot of the same at similar cost blowout because the flood risk there is nearly identical. So, yes, you are talking billions of dollars right up-front.

What's worse, because you need the diesel vent shafts here as a project assumption those will also need to be protected from a surface-level breach. Otherwise not only will they leak into the tunnel, but all the vent fans will get shorted out in the process. Add more incremental cost creep.

And then you are doing special shielding for the soil permeability. Which is not an unusual tunneling task as you note, but then project it out across the entire portal-to-portal length of roughly 1.8 miles...longer than the NSRL mainline. Incremental costs, but a hell of a lot of increments to span to get through all that fill.

---------------

Now say you do all that. Said uber-waterproofed tunnel will still have a speed-killing curve at Main St. on the Kendall Under approach, and a speed-killing junction on the Fitchburg Line side at the start of the terminal district after climbing all the way back up the grade. You may make a 15-min. bi-directional headway target for all those billions, but you'll only make it by the skin of your teeth and will have congestion issues around equipment swap slots, thru-routed NYC-Portland Amtrak slots coming off the Inland Route, and any calls from MetroWest for routing a few Fitchburg Secondary branchline trains out of Northboro to Kendall/NS along with the Worcesters. Its geometry-enforced capacity is still pretty threadbare.

Is that really going to be worth $4 billion in any universe when you can build the whole-hog Urban Ring NW quadrant--an actual studied proposal--for maybe a (upper-bound) eighth the cost while netting 3-6 minute Green Line branch headways instead of 15-minute RER?

---------------

RR-tunneling the Grand Junction is not a rational proposal...it's an abstract Civil Engineering Strongman bar debate that can only exist through willful dismissal of an actual MBTA-proposed project that delivers double-or-better the frequencies at a fraction of the cost. Too much bandwidth gets wasted here on how you can do it that way for unlimited money without ever asking why it should ever rationally be done that way when the UR is just sitting there in a file cabinet collecting dust waiting for someone to pick it back up.
 
So, $500 million for a Lechmere -> Kenmore full green build out with stations? That seems... pretty low given the cost of other projects. If would it cost only that much at an upper bound, seems like a complete no brainer that should be started yesterday. Also - honestly very curios - how does it hop from the grand junction to tie into Kenmore once it gets over the bridge ?
 
bakgwailo said:
So, $500 million for a Lechmere -> Kenmore full green build out with stations? That seems... pretty low given the cost of other projects. If would it cost only that much at an upper bound, seems like a complete no brainer that should be started yesterday. Also - honestly very curios - how does it hop from the grand junction to tie into Kenmore once it gets over the bridge ?
Click to expand...

These are the components:

  • Subway extension from Blandford portal to BU Bridge, cut-and-cover under the trolley reservation. This is a replacement for the unbuildable cross-Brookline tunnel in the original Phase III scoping study, since the study just cribbed some notes from the I-695 tunnel through there from the last Inner Belt Expressway design alts. Under-reservation is $$cheap$$ tunneling because of no road disruption and no utility relocations except at the grade crossings because of the reservation pre-dating all roadway utilities.
    • 1 intermediate subway stop at BU East or Central. Also cheaper than normal station construction because the road is maximally wide here.
    • Tunnel splits into flying junction past station for Grand Junction/Harvard Branch service or continuing B service. Portals on hillside next to BU Bridge for GJ/Harvard, portal on Armory-St. Paul block for B service with St. Paul as first surface stop.

  • At BU Bridge portal, provision for a bi-directional wye track for when the Harvard Branch is built (later).
    • Harvard Branch provides the direct access to West Station, so provisioned routings from either Cambridgeport or Kenmore is highly desireable.
    • Likely service plan once branch is built would filet service between the Lechmere-Kenmore 'circuit' (probably with both directions turning at GC loop), "A"-Harvard/Allston via Kenmore, and Harvard/Allston via Lechmere.

  • Grand Junction ROW from bridge to the Fitchburg Line left largely as-is, double-tracked (MIT driveway easements are revokable on the Mass Ave.-Main block to create room), with 600V DC feeders hooked spanning the B, Red Line, and GLX. Substation upgrades can probably be de-centralized elsewhere on the system given the availability of 3 evenly-spaced interconnects.
    • Mass Ave. the only priority grade-crossing elimination. Slim-profile overpass with station on top (offset to whichever side works best).
    • Binney St. an outright closure. 2 MIT ped crossings outright closures (foldable into station sitings). Main St. un-eliminable. Broadway likely un-eliminable because of steep incline too close to Main crossing. Cambridge St. an indefinite deferral unless you've got enough spare $$$ to do another Mass Ave.-style prefab overpass. Medford St. a least concern.
    • Signal system tied into Main, Broadway, Cambridge St., Medford St. lights for a trolley-priority phase. Eliminates 90% of the crossing impacts to traffic caused by the RR mode having absolute priority.

  • At Fitchburg Line, quick duck-under tunnel w/ flying junction onto GLX Union Branch.
    • When Urban Ring NE quadrant is built, the carhouse flyovers onto the Union Branch allow for radial thru-routing between quadrants in addition to straight-up branch service from Downtown via Lechmere.

  • Barebones unstaffed PoP-boarding stations. (Note: these are at-grade, not in a deep pit like GLX so no structural need for prepayment lobbies or enclosures.)
    • Twin City Plaza (egresses to Medford St. + McGrath Hwy.)
    • Cambridge St.
    • Kendall Option #1: 1 mid-block station between Main & Broadway.
    • Kendall Option #2: 2 flanking stations...1 at closed Binney St. serving Cambridge Center, 1 under the Main St. air rights overhang for MIT-centric destinations and direct eyesight proximity to the Red Line.
    • Mass Ave.
    • Cambridgeport (Ft. Washington Park vicinity)

  • When it comes time to add the Harvard Branch, chunk out the build. . .
    • West Station stub-out as #1 priority for quick Kendall transfers from RER.
    • Allston to Harvard Biz School. Stub-out @ Ohiri Field.
    • Interim Harvard Square Option???: Street-running 1500 ft. down N. Harvard St. over the bridge, cut through JFK Park, split Kennedy School buildings, stub-out at Brattle Square. Option to dump out at Ohiri Field short-turn if traffic is bad. Optional build, but you may need this as a bridge era in order to buy time for funding a dedicated tunnel.
    • Permanent Harvard Square Option #1: If/when funding allows, bend around Harvard Stadium into portal, cross under river and split JFK buildings, go into abandoned Brattle Sq. Red Line tunnel, stub-end platforms behind what's now the righthand wall down the main entrance stairs. 3-track tunnel allows for a center pocket mini-yard.
    • Permanent Harvard Square Option #2: If trajectory into old Red Line tunnel proves problematic, alter alignment to merge into busway with tracks in pavement. Install dual pantograph/pole-compatible overhead on the live wire, raise the TT return wire a few inches higher out of pantograph range so both vehicle types can coexist. Fashion some sort of turnback turnout so trolleys don't have to loop in traffic around Cambridge Common.
Consider the Harvard Branch an installment-plan build apart from the main quadrant, unless you're just building the cheapie West Station stub-out as part of the main package to tap the RER transfer coattails...then deferring the rest of the branch to its own unique funding pot.

-------------------------

On the base build. . .

Things that should NOT blow out their budgets or else there's something extremely wrong with the design-build process:

  • All Grand Junction lineside structures at-grade + BU Railroad Bridge refurbs.
  • All at-grade stations if they Keep It Simple Stupid™.
  • 600V electrification (system-distributed substation upgrades keeps costs down vs. building wholly dedicated subs).
  • Union Branch junction + Fitchburg Line duck-under.
  • Signal system + signal priority at remaining grade crossings.
  • BU Bridge junction + (optional) West Station stub-out. At-grade and grade separated.
Things that can easily be managed at low cost with competent project management, but risk cost creep with bloated management and too many chefs stirring the pot.

  • Under-reservation subway dig.
  • Mass Ave. overpass (especially if elevated station too grandiose). Might be easier to have fully offset platforms up above to keep the structure slimmer.
  • Mission-creep on at-grade stations. (Space constraints should hopefully curb the temptation to do garish overbuilds or headhouses, but you never know in this state.)
Things at higher-than-average risk for cost blowouts:

  • BU Central/East subway station (see: BU stirring the pot politically).
  • BU Bridge flying junction (somewhat sensitive dig under nerve-center intersection, BU Academy parking lot, and narrow cross-cut under Pike).
  • Any mandates for surplus-to-requirement grade separation beyond Mass Ave. If Cambridge St. separation is a must-have instead of something you mount if/when funds available, that's going to add bulk. If Broadway is a mandate, the extreme difficulty of getting up/down in constrained space close to the Main crossing is going to be a major cost-bloater.

Taken as a whole, station overbuilds are the biggest risk to the total price tag sailing. Crooked numbers on subway building are the next, because the B reservation should by all logic be the easiest cut-and-cover tunneling in the whole city but a shitty quote from a poorly-vetted or politically favored contractor can blow that out. And similar bad-quote shananigans on the crossing elimination overpass(es) can take a big toll.

$500M is a good quote for doing it right if it were scrutinized as closely as late-stage GLX was from its earliest-stage design. I would expect some inefficiency creep just because old habits die hard, so maybe $600-$750M as a hold-your-nose doomsday. But anything higher than that and any quote approaching a $B is just the state trying to tank another project with fuzzy math like they did with Red-Blue and NSRL.


Doomsday cost is still better and provides twice-or-better frequencies to more destinations than the multiple $B's it would take to build a waterproofed RER tunnel through Cambridge locked into performance-crippling geometry. There's off-scale costs and then there's off-this-planet costs that end up delivering considerably poorer-overall transit than the 'merely' off-scale option. It's 100%/0% which option should be getting the build mindshare on this corridor.
 
All great proposals^

Re-introducing light rail into the Harvard busway tunnel is something I'd thought about as a route for the Harvard-Kenmore future Green Line. It leaves open the possibility of extension to the GLX just west of Union Square. Another option for the Harvard-Kenmore Green Line at Harvard is a stub station at Harvard using the abandoned Red Line station and tunnel. This would preclude any extension north.
 
Interesting - the B would have to close down during the cut and cover, right? I guess that wouldn't be too bad to temporarily bustitute that portion as was done with the bridge work. Can it still hit 5-6 minute (or better) headways with the grade crossings? Honestly seems like a win-win cheap no brainer that would really go a long way toward the vision of the Urban Ring, and for $500-600 million seems like an incredibly cheap win (especially with matching federal funding). If it double branches (one to Harvard, one to Lechmere) - would that disrupt balance in the central subway, or would you think its turning at Kenmore?
 
bakgwailo said:
Interesting - the B would have to close down during the cut and cover, right? I guess that wouldn't be too bad to temporarily bustitute that portion as was done with the bridge work. Can it still hit 5-6 minute (or better) headways with the grade crossings? Honestly seems like a win-win cheap no brainer that would really go a long way toward the vision of the Urban Ring, and for $500-600 million seems like an incredibly cheap win (especially with matching federal funding). If it double branches (one to Harvard, one to Lechmere) - would that disrupt balance in the central subway, or would you think its turning at Kenmore?
Click to expand...

B would be in continuous service as a St. Paul-BC shuttle during construction, as they'd probably throw down a temporary set of crossovers by St. Paul to aid turnbacks. That way the bus shuttles don't have to cover much area to span the service outage. I'd imagine BC would be a candidate to get supplemented with super-extended C Line service up Chestnut Hill Ave. to preserve the one-seat. Shutdown should not last for eons, however, because this is very easy tunneling with a bare minimum of utility relocation. Util relocation is the usual reason why cut-and-cover proceeds molasses-slow in built-up downtowns. 2 years is well within reach, 3 if the BU station cavern needs special excavation accommodations (like closing 1 Comm Ave. lane at a time and staging it with multiple lane shifts).


Grade crossings won't be a problem as the surface lines already achieve 6-min. headways with a gazillion grade crossings. Minus Mass Ave. & Binney there are exactly 4 crossings here. At Main & Broadway the crossings are at existing signaled intersections, so the transit phase is easy to work in at minimum-impact. Cambridge St. & Medford St. are close enough to existing signals that setups can be tweaked to make it cohesive. Trolley signalization would be basically like adding a left-turn phase to the existing cycle, except that the trolley doesn't have a lane queue to fight through so it can clear on an extremely short phase. It's enough capacity to mix/match multiple service patterns and end up with a 3-4 min. headway...less-dense than the Central Subway, but more dense than a singular branch schedule.


For Central Subway dispatching, the subway extension to BU Bridge is yuuuuuuuge for traffic management at Kenmore, since it eliminates all Comm Ave. traffic lights to St. Paul including the BU Bridge double-light intersection from hell. It'll be only 11-12 (post- stop consolidation) surface stops remaining to BC, which is right in line with the C and E for surface stop roster that's manageable to dispatch. Plus the BU Central/East subway station will do wonders to whip dwell times into shape from the 3 crush-load surface stops it replaces. GLT study modernizations (surface signal priority, Type 10's, subway signal revamps) clean out the rest of the garbage-in/garbage-out malady at the Kenmore portal well before this gets built, so we'll already have an active reference point of what a better-functioning Kenmore looks like before the UR hook-in goes to design-build.


Ring service wouldn't be able to turn at Kenmore without gargantuan structural modifications to the station, because Kenmore Loop only goes C/D-to-C/D and doesn't touch the B berths. So it would be running to downtown, and riders wanting to get to Longwood would be hopping platforms to pick up a D. It was never feasible to run one-seat around the whole Ring, as BRT would get too strung-out on schedule covering that distance and LRT is challenged by lack of feasible ROW's on the south half. So Kenmore is going to be a big transfer station...cross-platform if there's some LRT segments poking south, or upstairs/downstairs if the NW & NE quadrants are dedicated-ROW light rail and the SW & SE quadrants are a BRT mix-and-match.

The north end of the subway is under-capacity from Brattle Loop @ GC thru Lechmere, so the varied service patterns can cumulatively load-balance the service. This is a "Green Line Reimagined" build in which the old Kenmore-or-bust concerns don't dominate like they used to, because utilization of north end capacity and the run-thru potential when the NE quadrant of the Ring gets built spread service patterns very differently than the one linear trunk we're used to. It can work very well through spreading the load around the various pieces of the puzzle...in part because such targeted load-spreading systemically helps decongest downtown crowding, indirectly speeding up dwell times at a lot of major stops.


And...to bring it back to topic...the Harvard Branch is a big frigging deal for the West Station connectivity. The down-payment West stub hooks the Ring into the RER network, providing the fast transfer to Kendall and North Station at high-enough frequency to meet every RER train on the Worcester Line in both directions. And then the pay-as-you-go Allston & Harvard Square extension offers equally fast trip to Cambridge's top destination. Offering the single-fastest transfer to/from MIT or Harvard and MetroWest has major economic coattails for new academic & research installations looking to proliferate into the western 'burbs. And it's this build, much more than trying to tart up the Grand Junction for RER, that hits that far-reaching economic paydirt because high-headway service can pool Harvard, MIT, and BU into the West Station transfer with RER via all the various routing options. No other build ties that many loose ends together.
 
TallIsGood said:
Are there maps of these proposals anywhere? I can understand better by maps than the textual descriptions.
Click to expand...

Sort of. The 2004 DEIR was broken out into Phase I (final implementation of the entire CT1-CT11 on-street express route system) -> Phase II ("Silver Line-ification" of the trunk on partial dedicated ROW, partial street-running) -> Phase III (fully grade separated ROW and rail conversion) project phasing. Phase III in particular was given skeletal treatment because of the mystery of how to make a southern-half ROW. So what does exist for published spider maps only shows the mixed-running BRT Phase II, with a lot of uncertainties around Harvard Branch routings because the study pre-dates the Harvard-CSX land swap.

0444633d-793a-4087-85c5-2cb2ce2ecbe0


768px-MBTA_Urban_Ring_map.svg.png


Phase III on the northern half does conform directly to the Grand Junction and Eastern Route/SL Gateway per the study text, so it would only differ from these mixed-running maps by snapping direct to the rail lines and omitting the Wellington-Malden 'bulb-out' in favor of just a Sullivan superstation (and *maybe* an offset Assembly station depending on Mystic bridge placement). Harvard Branch would conform to a transit path Harvard promised to set aside at Beacon Park, and probably use the old CSX siding underpass of Cambridge St. to reach Western Ave.

The DEIR says next to nothing about the SW & SE quadrants under Phase III, other than speccing a highly unrealistic tunnel-thon under very narrow streets. This is where they lifted the late-60's I-695 tunnel plan wholesale and busted it down to 1 carriageway's berth to attempt to link halves through Longwood. Given that the defeat of that highway tunnel from local opposition and historical impacts was what hastened the demise of inner-city expressway construction in the first place, it's as unbuildable now as it was back then and other options bending to Kenmore have to be considered instead on the re-study. On a BRT tunnel you're probably looking at something under Mountfort St. and Brookline Ave. On an LRT tunnel that's where "bury the B" comes in as a guaranteed study-alt...and since it would be so much cheaper than a Mountfort subway the B tunnel has to be considered a shoo-in.

As for BRT vs. LRT...BRT was favored during the '04 DEIR, but that's because all the study metrics still assumed a completed Silver Line tunnel and much greater scale of Boston's BRT system. It was also done during the heyday of "BRT mania" when transpo lobbyists were pushing that as the God mode and light rail was still being pooh-poohed at the national level. That bus overhype is long dead (thanks, Silver Line, for doing your cromulent part to kill its national appeal!), LRT is undergoing a renaissance for new project starts and fed funding therein, and of course our big BRT connecting trunk never got built at all. Chances are a re-study would give LRT full parity or outright advantage, especially with the GLT initiative being such a game-changer for LRT capacity in Boston.

To pick up the pieces they'd probably have to break the awkward phasing apart.

  • The Crosstown routes rollout (still badly needed!) in Phase I should get folded into some next-gen Yellow Line Key Routes initiative.
  • Phase III on the northern half can/should be expedited to early build due to ROW availability, and attractiveness of light rail. Needs a chunked-out installment process (i.e. Cambridge quadrant first + West Station stub, Chelsea/Airport quadrant and/or rest of Harvard Branch sometime after on separate funding efforts).
  • Phase II mixed-running on the north half should probably be downgraded to non-preferred Alt., because of the expedited Phase III and crappiness of duplicating efforts in short succession.
  • Phase II south half should be broken out and expedited somewhere during or near-after the norther rail build. They can study it street-running Kenmore-Dudley, and dedicated-running Dudley-Southie using souped-up Melnea Cass Blvd. bus lanes and transit vehicles on Southie Haul Road. And they need to be prepared for that to be the only thing they can possibly build, because of the blowout tunneling costs.
  • Phase III south half needs to be punted way, way, way out detached from all the rest, because it's not even clear how to do it. And if it's not at all clear how to do it while the other moving parts of the DEIR do have straightforward implementations...then it's not worth bogging down the re-study grasping at more straws here. Study other interim augmenting solutions like Washington St. light rail and maybe some improved D-to-E connections (which could wrap around to Kenmore Loop) to bolster the load-bearing Longwood and Dudley connections cheaply and help backstop mixed-running BRT. Then paper-guesstimate the dedicated ROW in some separate study thinkpiece.
Urban_Ring_Project_(MBTA)
 
Another thought on NSRL/regional rail, as far as outreach and PR/marketing is concerned:

My wife and I are on a North Shore day trip, and we stopped by the Azorean Restaurant that is literally right nect to the Gloucesterr CR stop. Anyone seriously pushing in favor of regional rail should build some relationships with businesses like that, so close to the rail that they could greatly benefit from greater connections.

For example, this is an Azorean restaurant on the North Shore. There is a sizable Azorean community on the South Shore/Cape. Making it easier for the two to connect is self evidently beneficial.
 
Last edited:
So this may have relevance to the T's quest to get some EMU's. . .

NJ Transit just placed an order with Bombardier for 58 self-powered cars based on the stock Bombardier MultiLevel Coach carbody, which is the current best-selling bi-level coach in North America for high-platform territory and very similar to the T's K-cars (but with 2 x 2 instead of 3 x 2 seating).

It's a somewhat unorthodox EMU arrangement in that the consists are 'hybrid' and lash up power cars to plain vanilla MLV coaches re-wired for either/or MU trainlining or push-pull trainlining. This is different from how most EMU's work, where either all cars in the set are self-powered or the unpowered cars sprinkled in are special-order 'dummy' EMU's (example: Metro North's M8 trailers) that have no propulsion but can only trainline with their own-kind EMU's because of electronic limitations. The advantage is that it lets NJT, which already owns 425+ MLV push-pull coaches, massively consolidate its fleet management on one car make despite having a near-50/50 electric-vs.-diesel system where that would've been previously impossible. Seating capacity in the power cars is near-equivalent to all other cars.

-------------------------

The power cars are mid-set coaches without an operator's cab, and thus have to be sandwiched between stock cab cars. Minimum consist requirements are that the power cars be chunked together in 3's so each power car is bookended by unpowered cars.

3-car minimum:

  • <Unpowered cab car>--<Power car>--<Unpowered cab car>
6-car:

  • <Unpowered cab car>--<Power car>--<Unpowered coach>--<Unpowered coach>--<Power car>--<Unpowered cab car>
9-car (MBTA maximum):

  • <Unpowered cab car>--<Power car>--<Unpowered coach>--<Unpowered coach>--<Power car>--<Unpowered coach>--<Unpowered coach>--<Power car>--<Unpowered cab car>
12-car (NJT maximum):

  • <Unpowered cab car>--<Power car>--<Unpowered coach>--<Unpowered coach>--<Power car>--<Unpowered coach>--<Unpowered coach>--<Power car>--<Unpowered coach>--<Unpowered coach>--<Power car>--<Unpowered cab car>
-------------------------

The propulsion on the power cars is overpowered vs. a normal EMU to compensate for the extra deadweight they have to push, allow for continued operation if one power car in a multi- power car set fails, and be good for 110 MPH vs. the 80 MPH Arrow III's they replace. They can also be run at full speed in traditional push-pull configuration with a loco hauling if a rescue is needed for a wire problem or something (with most other EMU makes you'd be in the dark and running at restricted speed if being pulled by a helper loco).

Supposedly you can "traditionalize" the sets more by swapping in more power cars for unpowered trailers to make them more like a conventional EMU consist where majority of cars are powered. But according to Bombardier that shouldn't be necessary as the contract stipulates they must have equal-or-better acceleration rates as the zippy Arrows in their minimum configurations. That'll be the big thing to watch as they go through development, because the MLV carbody is a very heavy frame. If they score on meeting/beating an Arrow with a hybrid set that can also do 110 on the NEC, it'll be revolutionary.

-------------------------

What's the relevance to the T??? NJT's contract is buffed out with 'slush' options for 636 more cars of their own plus 250 others earmarked for SEPTA, any of which can be sliced/diced into whatever ratio of power cars vs. traditional coaches vs. cab cars is necessary. SEPTA, after the Silverliner V debacle, is opting for this as replacements for the ancient Silverliner IV's rather than go all the way back to the drawing board designing a Silverliner VI from scratch. They don't have full funding earmarked yet so the options are stuffed at the back of an extremely long contract (and obviously "optional"), but by piggybacking on NJT's design decisions they get out of having to do a full-blown procurement process and save some money while having NJT do all the debugging for them.

Where the 'slush' factor comes in is that the MLV coach is a fairly generic item that can be purchased pretty much at-will. A lot of NJT's options are simply for replacing their shot Comet II & IV single-levels in diesel territory. But if they wanted to they could simply sign another contract for straight coaches and launder out some of these options to spread the love on the power cars. Sort of like how they traded MARC 54 of their options on the last MLV coach order. The receiving agency could stack their share of NJT options to power cars then just do their own order of straight MLV coaches. And the extreme length of this contract ensures that these options will be available to potentially barter for another 5 years.

Both the T and MARC (for switching its own Penn Line MLV fleet from loco-haul to self-propelled) are ideal candidates for this. And it fits the T's timeline for first possible Providence Line electrification, since the RER study would have to complete and they'd have to budget for Sharon substation expansion + wire-up storage areas to functionally be able to run.

Advantages:

  • Potentially massive vehicle scale with multi-agency procurements driving down prices, extending maintainability decades out.

  • This is the boldest attempt at a fully standardized FRA-compliant EMU. Bolder still when considering Bombardier likely to offer same propulsion product in BiLevel Coach packaging for 8-inch platform territory (e.g. GO Transit electrification, since they have a fleet of 650+ BLV coaches). Anything else the T looks at, including derived Euro imports, is going to require fresh teething and some greater degree of modding.

  • NJT works out all the bugs. If these end up lemons, don't have to buy.

  • Easier to deal in laundered options than fresh-procure if design is compatible. NJT has flex to deal, and if T expresses initial interest the options can be held for a very long time.

  • T still needs to make another 200+ coach purchase to retire the decaying Bomardier single-levels. FCMB has see-sawed back and forth about considering single-levels or more bi-levels. As of last update, it's swung back to bi-levels (probably because the market for commuter flats is comatose and no one's offering a fair price). Kawasaki's rail division is losing money and Rotem is a dumpster fire, so unclear who would build more K-car clones as CRRC's bi-level design is very different. Making a big order of 2 x 2 seating MLV coaches would settle this dilemma, split some of the dwell time difference between flats and the 3 x 2 seat K-cars, and open the door wide for buying the power cars.

  • Speed: Significant Providence Line schedule gains with an EMU that can top 100 MPH, as station spacing may allow for generous segments of 90+ and momentary triple-digit speeds.

  • Scalability: If southside gets an MLV-heavier fleet and the K-cars start to live north, electrifying additional southside lines gets much easier only requiring small supplemental purchases of power cars.

  • Since Bombardier is likely going to be serving this up in both MLV and BLV packaging, good chances of a single-level variant with same propulsion coming available some years later that we could use for the Urban Rail/intra-128 lines. It's just not a tincan that's readily available today because BBD hasn't produced domestic flats in 20+ years, its last single-level U.S. design was aluminum which has fallen out of favor to stainless steel, and it would have to adapt one of its Euro models for the U.S. in order to plug that gap.

Disadvantages:

  • Don't know if the hybrid setup is going to accelerate its weight as well as a traditional EMU, despite the promises. (Counterpoint: But we don't have to buy if that's the case!)

  • Bi-level. TransitMatters is going to be nonplussed that these aren't flats (and the transpo blogosphere will be in a rage...but that's just another day ending in -y for them. :rolleyes:). Need to consider what the marketplace will bear. Flats are hard to come by without risking design mods and a prolonged procurement. If this is the most readily available and risk-padded buy because of the NJT 'guinea pig' and option laundering, can we make do with it? Does 2 x 2 seating mollify some of the concerns? I don't think flats vs. bi's is necessarily the hill to die on, because if one has a significantly easier procurement path than the other we get >90% what we want having something self-propelled sooner. But this needs a closer look.

  • Fairmount Line. 3-car bi's are an awkward fit...but as above, is that the best we can do now? Do the prospects look better a few years down the road for single-levels in this propulsion package, after we've electrified a few more lines and can shift fleets around to better-differentiate what's assigned to Regional Rail schedules vs. Urban Rail schedules? Can we tolerate bi's on Urban Rail as a bridge era to better things when they still from Day 1 will beat the snot out of any diesel or DMU? Again...needs a closer look.

  • K-cars. Pretty sure MLV's and K-cars don't play particularly nice in practice even though they're supposed to; MARC tends to keep their identical K-car fleet separated from its MLV's. So we'd probably have to adopt MLV's for a substantial portion of the replacement coach fleet and stuff a lot of K's and Rotem's up north. It would definitely be asking too much to try to have any K-cars take up residence in a self-propelled set.

-------------------------

  • NJT marketing video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWG4GhScBL0
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top