Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail (South Coast Rail)

Sorry to bump this but I would rather place this in the proper thread than the MBTA construction thread.

There was recently a bidders forum for two bids: The New Bedford Main Line, Stations, and Layover and for the Fall River Secondary, Stations, and Layover. A very interesting powerpoint is now posted to the MBTA Bidding Web Page:
https://bc.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/B...se 1 New Bedford Public Meeting_web_final.pdf

The bid is active now and there has been a lot of work on existing culverts and tracks. The SCR page on the MassDOT site is updated frequently with construction info.
 

As if "How the fuck are we going to run this thing?" wasn't aleady enough of an unanswered conundrum, the price for Town of Middleboro's appeasement on moving most service from the current TOD-rich station through the new Pilgrim Jct. parking sink was that the state had to re-commit to another Buzzards Bay CR study in tandem. So...yippee...take three branches off the Dorchester-Quincy single-track pinch that absolutely no one is talking about how to scale up for RUR and make three more branches-off-a-branch because they tied themselves in knots putting cart before horse with the local negotiations. Surely this isn't going to be an unresolvable quagmire when one or more of these moving parts has to be ultra slow-walked once they realize the enormity of the capacity jam they're painting themselves into.
 
How close will the new Fall River and New Bedford station be to their respective downtowns?
 
Blackbird said:
How close will the new Fall River and New Bedford station be to their respective downtowns?
Click to expand...

New Bedford terminus (what they used to call "Whale's Tooth") is near dead-center downtown at the Pearl St. footbridge over MA 18. About two thirds of the way down 18 between I-195 and US 6, about 8 blocks north of the Whaling Museum and SRTA bus hub...close enough that they can probably easily widen out the bus loopage between the SRTA terminal and the CR station to incorporate both into nearly all route termini. Hopefully at some point soon they tear down that eyesore of an expressway stub and boulevardize 18 completely as an extension of JFK Memorial/Acushnet Ave. because that would be the finishing touch for a full downtown. There's still a bit much of Chinese wall effect from 18, which is why they are giving the footbridge over it to the station so much attention in the plans.

I don't know why they're renaming the "Kings Highway" intermediate to utter generica "North New Bedford" unless that's suddenly got squishy on station siting and they're sticking a placeholder on it while they troubleshoot. It's quizzically absent from the station slides now after being thought of as a lock pretty much all along, so don't know what's going on with that.


Fall River Depot is at the historic station site south of the President Ave. overpass. Durfree St. becomes the de facto station driveway where it wraps between Turner St. and N. Main. The Battleship Cove station further south was deleted from the project due to low projected utilization, but can be re-added if service is extended to Newport (tracks to the RI state line are being funded for freight reactivation right now for two customers way down by Mt. Hope Ave., with a runaround track to go next to the sewage plant at the literal state line). FRD is more problematically off-center from the SRTA bus hub at City Hall Plaza, and details have been lacking pretty much since Day 1 as to how they plan to integrate local transit. Much of what used to exist around Davol St. there the last time commuter rail service hit the FR Depot location was nuked from orbit to build that Route 79 expressway eyesore, so while there's decent residential density to the east the waterfront is basically a sad half-empty strip of blighted plazas and auto shops. Right now only two routes--SRTA 2 & 14--go near the CR station, which is not nearly enough to meaningfully affect transit shares in the city. Battleship Cove station was originally justified on grounds that it was closer to the City Hall bus depot...but it still wasn't close enough.

While New Bedford is pretty much a shoo-in to make decent use of bus transfers from Day 1, Fall River has a lot of work to do...and the SCR Task Force has been too busy chasing payola for its own connected pols than trying to do multimodal planning drudgery. Preparedness is a concern here. While one would expect downtown New Bedford to at least tread water on ridership IF the advertised Phase I frequencies can be met with decent OTP (big if, however...) and to start thriving quickly if they un-break the frequency cap with a properly designed Phase II...Fall River has bigger question marks to square with its multimodal integration. The picture gets rosier if MA 79 expressway teardown Phase II proceeds and boulevardizes the highway all points south of the US 6 interchange into a revamped Davol St. with oodles of TOD. That can--if planned well--infill a whole new neighborhood around FR Depot and drag in a much more impressive local transit revamp along with it. I would say if local planning were a bit more on-the-ball with these things there's still time to keep pace and get these 'vision thing' multimodal and TOD considerations set...but Fall River politics is absolute clownshoes right now with the Mayor's escapades and the SCR Task Force members are absolutely fucking useless so right now there's a concerning lack of local organization and general stability for integrating this into the urban fabric. Ridership might well struggle here to much greater degree than New Beford until they get their house in order on SRTA and other things. It's a steeper planning learning curve than New Bedford inherits. They have par odds of eventually getting it, but the incumbent local leadership starts out in rougher shape compared to New Bedford.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
As if "How the fuck are we going to run this thing?" wasn't aleady enough of an unanswered conundrum, the price for Town of Middleboro's appeasement on moving most service from the current TOD-rich station through the new Pilgrim Jct. parking sink was that the state had to re-commit to another Buzzards Bay CR study in tandem. So...yippee...take three branches off the Dorchester-Quincy single-track pinch that absolutely no one is talking about how to scale up for RUR and make three more branches-off-a-branch because they tied themselves in knots putting cart before horse with the local negotiations. Surely this isn't going to be an unresolvable quagmire when one or more of these moving parts has to be ultra slow-walked once they realize the enormity of the capacity jam they're painting themselves into.
Click to expand...

It's so frustrating living on one of those branches and the restricted current service levels because of the single track mainline. The state spends millions of dollars on construction, but then follows up with horrible schedules that aren't convenient. I feel a big part of the reason that Greenbush has such low ridership numbers compared to expectations, is the fact that headways can exceed 2 hours between trains. I fear the state is doing the same thing for South Coast Rail and Buzzards Bay.

Is there any serious proposal to double track the whole Old Colony main line? I didn't understand why they didn't take the opportunity to double track when reconstructing the Quincy Station Garage? I guess the other possibility would be to run all commuter rail trains only to Braintree and then have a RUR like shuttle between Braintree and South Station that runs every 15 minutes?
 
Java King said:
I guess the other possibility would be to run all commuter rail trains only to Braintree and then have a RUR like shuttle between Braintree and South Station that runs every 15 minutes?
Click to expand...

That was, in fact one of the alternatives in the Rail Vision study. That study also envisions the full SCR build through Stoughton.
 
Semass said:
That was, in fact one of the alternatives in the Rail Vision study. That study also envisions the full SCR build through Stoughton.
Click to expand...

Same deal with turning the Needham Line into a dinky with forced transfer at Forest Hills. The idea was...to say the least...NOT very popular in public comment, with a lot of local pols and Legislators sufficiently angried up by the constituent phone calls to go "If you even THINK about doing this. . ." So, no longer under any serious consideration for a bunch of obvious reasons.

Java King said:
It's so frustrating living on one of those branches and the restricted current service levels because of the single track mainline. The state spends millions of dollars on construction, but then follows up with horrible schedules that aren't convenient. I feel a big part of the reason that Greenbush has such low ridership numbers compared to expectations, is the fact that headways can exceed 2 hours between trains. I fear the state is doing the same thing for South Coast Rail and Buzzards Bay.

Is there any serious proposal to double track the whole Old Colony main line? I didn't understand why they didn't take the opportunity to double track when reconstructing the Quincy Station Garage? I guess the other possibility would be to run all commuter rail trains only to Braintree and then have a RUR like shuttle between Braintree and South Station that runs every 15 minutes?
Click to expand...

No...absolutely nothing planned. And Quincy + Braintree aren't interested in lobbying on anyone's behalf because they've got their Red Line. Wollaston Station was closed for a full year without slightest hint of foresight for provisioning for DT commuter rail by shifting things around. It reopened on the same exact footprint as always, meaning that single-track restriction is now baked in permanent. No consideration at Quincy Ctr. either for scooping out the gravel fill between the CR station wall and Newport Ave. while the parking deck floors above are all demolished to provision for a 2nd track cavern they can bust down a wall and make an island platform out of. Though theoretically that shouldn't be an enormous task to do detached from anything related to the ex- parking decks, because they aren't structurally conjoined. Still, though, it's more expensive to come back and do it later.

Double-tracking just JFK and QC -proper into island platforms so there's a passing/meet opportunity around any stopped train is the biggest single service increaser they can swing, and it's single-point touches only...moderate cost at Quincy for the structural work, dirt cheap at JFK because you're just reconfiguring the busways to serve up the extra space. More consequential than any running track touches, which are going to take awhile to stage...especially on the Savin Hill pinch where burying RL Braintree-under-Ashmont to carve out the room is a complex (if hardly megaproject) undertaking with troublesome planning because of how MassHighway and the MPO always hijack it to a billion-dollar price tag for cramming stupid I-93 HOV capacity grabs. But nope...nothing. Not even any cheapo JFK considerations, which would immediately allow M'boro and Plymouth to run right against the taillights of any Greenbush train to the gain of a handful more backfill slots from the resulting mass schedule recalibration.

The speculated FR/NB schedules are so thin on margins anyway that even though they're making a big show of "See, see! We did it with Phase I, you haters!" the windows are so incredibly brittle by any Purple Line standards that OTP is going straight in the tank for all five (six?) Old Colony branches. Which already happens constantly enough when Greenbush gets shafted with a delay to make up time on a blown Plymouth or M'boro schedule. Everyone gets to join in that fun from now on...then multiply the occurrences by 10 so it makes perennial-dregs Worcester OTP look downright aspirational by comparison. At least if somebody were awake enough to at least cue up a JFK track doubling and put Quincy into prelim design there'd be a solution in the pipeline for inoculating OTP back to safe do-no-harm levels so this whole Phase I adventure seems less bonkers on its face. But nope...as it has always been, SCR brainlock forces every planner who gets sucked into it to adopt the same rote arse-end-up mentality and completely spazz on how one gets the trains moving in one piece across Route 128, let alone I-495.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
The Battleship Cove station further south was deleted from the project due to low projected utilization
Click to expand...

What, 20 Boy Scout troops per weekend being conveyed to and from the USS Massachusetts wasn't justification?

<in all seriousness, it's such a neat floating museum--and those who can combo it with seeing its sister ship, the USS Alabama, anchored in an equally grand setting in Mobile Bay, are strongly urged to do so. As grim and desperate as the times that we live in now are, touring the memorabilia section and seeing the displays of captured Japanese Imperial Army weaponry and this issue of Time magazine are a reminder of how horrific the global situation can get...>
 
F-Line, Thanks for your comments and detailed explanation on Old Colony Main Line restrictions. Yes, it's just maddening they rebuilt Wollaston with no planning for expansion in the future for Regional Rail. I fear I'll be dead before I see Greenbush under wires with 30 minute....or even 1-hr.........service levels.
 
DBM said:
What, 20 Boy Scout troops per weekend being conveyed to and from the USS Massachusetts wasn't justification?

<in all seriousness, it's such a neat floating museum--and those who can combo it with seeing its sister ship, the USS Alabama, anchored in an equally grand setting in Mobile Bay, are strongly urged to do so. As grim and desperate as the times that we live in now are, touring the memorabilia section and seeing the displays of captured Japanese Imperial Army weaponry and this issue of Time magazine are a reminder of how horrific the global situation can get...>
Click to expand...

Oh, I've done Battleship Cove many times. It's an absolute ace tourist attraction, and they have enough rotating exhibits that you learn something new each time. Amazes me how many people drive right by it without ever giving it a second thought, but that speaks to how much the ugly-ass MA 79 wall still hurts the city. The at-grade boulevard replacing the decayed viaduct interchange with 195 actually makes it far easier to reach FR Heritage State Park than ever before, because now you just bang a right at the first light after the expressway ends and you're immediately there, with the loop-around way back from the park parking lot taking you straight to the intersection for the new 195 access. That's a big improvement...especially because traffic counterintuitively seems to move better than ever on the well laid-out boulevard than it ever did on the rickety shoulder-less old viaduct ramp spaghetti. Now MassHighway just needs to stop dragging its feet on Phase II teardown between US 6 and Battleship Cove to remake Davol St. into that complete-streets boulevard.

Transit is never going to work correctly or feather enough routes across the gap between SRTA hub @ City Hall and commuter rail @ FR Depot unless a re-boulevardized Davol can take up role as a major bus artery. Durfee & N. Main split the bus loading where they operate as a parellel one-way pair out to FR Depot, but the actual waterfront itself is un-covered with pronounced waterfront transit gap north of the CR station when N. Main goes 2-way and bends inland, and that strange transit no-man's between City Hall and State Pier that bears the scars of the deleted 79 spaghetti ramps. It'll be easier to walk several blocks from FR Depot to reach Battleship Cove than take local transit as it's laid out today, because of how much those gaps hurt. It's not going to work for them unless they can elbow-grease Central St. + Pocasset St. as one-way bus pairs west of City Hall then run a substantial route schedule all the way up Phase II boulevardized Davol to re-weight the whole downtown local transit map and do their best imperfect-but-plenty-good-enough rebalancing of the SRTA network around the split City Hall vs. FR Depot nodes. Arrival of Purple Line needs to come with an explicit mandate to increase the city's transit shares overall with full-treatment workover of SRTA, because while it's a transit-oriented city the primary nodes are locationally not plug-and-play like downtown New Bedford. Fall River and the state via regional RTA actually has to work it to the hilt here with a companion-piece "Better Bus" effort. Then, in concert with 79 Phase II teardown and all the waterfront TOD canvas that serves up to use wisely (or unwisely?) they've got their ducks in a row. Think about it this way: if those Boy Scouts can get a bus right at the station kiss-and-ride that drops them off at Battleship Cove's front-door instead of hoofing it or making the convoluted connection, how many more Troops would bother scheduling field trips in the first place? Hell...Heritage Park can just keep an on-demand shuttle van on standby just for booked group tours (give schools a freebie fare on it as a perk) and easy-as-pie square the only logistical hurdle for the permission-slips bearing hordes of screaming kids.

It is bugfark-maddening the anti-attention the SCR Task Force has given this important piece, because relatively-speaking it's just "no-build" service-side bus optimization best-practices the likes of which is so in-style these days with the overall RUR conversation and its intermodal coattails. And for City of Fall River said optimization is really set-it-and-forget in terms of imparting stability and growth curve to FR Depot. Get the bus connections more optimally laid out so the fundamentals are rock-solid, then watch the year-to-year mode shares slowly but steadily build as the waterfront builds mindshare. But the brainfreeze on all that touches this project is so pervasive that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if it doesn't include showy $$$ for steel, concrete, and striped parking spots. I really think as it stands now FR Branch ridership is going to struggle a lot vs. its NB counterpart, and these people at the top will be utterly baffled to explain why while relative conditions on the ground are veritably beating them over the heads with the answer. As it stands you can take any-bus in New Bedford to nail the rail transfer...and that's going to let the Phase I ridership meet or slightly exceed expectations even with Phase I train frequencies still shit. You can't do the same in an otherwise well bus-covered city like Fall River where FR Depot is born into a broken circuit to three-quarters of the bus route network. There has to be a strategic transpo + dev retrenching around the waterfront that starts now.

Captain Obvious shouts "DUH!" until he's hoarse, and so on. . .
 
Last edited:
F-Line to Dudley said:
how much the ugly-ass MA 79 wall still hurts the city.
Click to expand...

Seriously. Just look at the streetview. 79 amputates the inland neighborhood from Battleship Cove as remorselessly as the Central Artery once cleaved Downtown from the Waterfront--and the harms inflicted on Fall River are surely analogous to those which the Artery afflicted upon what is now the Greenway corridor.

The other glaring example in our state is, of course, the indefatigable I-91 viaduct in Springfield, ripping apart the fabric that would otherwise integrate Downtown with its waterfront. I'm surprised its demolition is not more of an urgent priority for MassDOT--unless I'm oblivious to headlines/pressures that are already emanating from out of the 413? (just don't say "WestMass"...).

If I were trying to orchestrate a campaign for demolition in the Pioneer Valley, I would just do a before-and-after traveling roadshow of how Seattle has transformed in the wake of the Alaskan Viaduct demolition. You'd think that would be enough.
 
DBM said:
The other glaring example in our state is, of course, the indefatigable I-91 viaduct in Springfield, ripping apart the fabric that would otherwise integrate Downtown with its waterfront. I'm surprised its demolition is not more of an urgent priority for MassDOT--unless I'm oblivious to headlines/pressures that are already emanating from out of the 413? (just don't say "WestMass"...).

If I were trying to orchestrate a campaign for demolition in the Pioneer Valley, I would just do a before-and-after traveling roadshow of how Seattle has transformed in the wake of the Alaskan Viaduct demolition. You'd think that would be enough.
Click to expand...

(Mods, feel free to move...)

Pretty obvious to me why that's not really going anywhere:

- Even if you wave a magic wand and erase I-91 from existence, the rail lines run directly along the waterfront, in a way analogous to the Worcester Line in the "throat" for the Allston project. So you're arguably never going to have a well integrated waterfront.

- A substantial part of the elevated section is needed to clear the rail lines as they curve into Springfield station from the North, South, and West, crossing underneath.

- There's no expressway-grade alternative to I-91 through downtown Springfield and you could rightfully expect some very strong pressure from VT/NH to any sort of suggestion that something other than a continuous highway is acceptable.

- Unlike Alaskan Way, serving a downtown of a major city, I don't think anyone is going to seriously consider paying for a replacement highway tunnel for Springfield.
 
millerm277 said:
(Mods, feel free to move...)

Pretty obvious to me why that's not really going anywhere:

- Even if you wave a magic wand and erase I-91 from existence, the rail lines run directly along the waterfront, in a way analogous to the Worcester Line in the "throat" for the Allston project. So you're arguably never going to have a well integrated waterfront.

- A substantial part of the elevated section is needed to clear the rail lines as they curve into Springfield station from the North, South, and West, crossing underneath.

- There's no expressway-grade alternative to I-91 through downtown Springfield and you could rightfully expect some very strong pressure from VT/NH to any sort of suggestion that something other than a continuous highway is acceptable.

- Unlike Alaskan Way, serving a downtown of a major city, I don't think anyone is going to seriously consider paying for a replacement highway tunnel for Springfield.
Click to expand...

Definitely. It's not 'good', but there's no plausible alternative. And particularly north of center-downtown it also hid a lot of industrial crud underneath...including a distended mess of a Boston & Maine freight yard that began where the current 291 interchange is and extended way the hell up to where all the sprawly medical office buildings on 116 currently are. Plus, if they boulevardized the really really unnecessary US 5 expressway stub hugging the West Springfield riverbank you'd get one of your pretty riverbanks back at no big traffic demerits. I don't know what the hell the original planners were thinking when they did up 5 as a craptacularly substandard 55 MPH divided expressway. It doesn't 'do' anything.

I-391 can happily go fuck off, too, if they just turn the first 1.5 miles into a Pike connector w/ full interchange then boulevard all the rest through Chicopee and Holyoke into a relocated MA 116/MA 141. It looks from a few under-developed blocks in Holyoke that it was supposed to wrap back to I-91 at strangely overbuilt Exit 16...or even be the I-91 mainline itself in lieu of crossing the river to West Springfield. But no...from every historical source I've seen it was always intended to be a dead-end stump like that (although the originally planned Pike interchange was shelved). Get rid of it and let a street grid take root around an adjacent Chicopee infill commuter rail station running the Greenfield-Hartford service flavor of Hartford Line RUR. Holyoke is already thick with rail transloading thanks to all of Pioneer Valley RR's numerous waterfront spurs and aggressive marketing; 391 def isn't needed as a truck route of any consequence.


OK...there's your Fall River/MA 79 analogy: free Chicopee and Holyoke from the shackles of 391 and chart a new riverside density canvas from what it leaves behind.
 
That expressway section of US 5 existed before I91, so it definitely did have a purpose at one point as part of the main north/south through route. I91 was originally planned to run along the US 5 alignment, but Springfield lobbied to have it on the east bank instead.
springfield-1963.jpg

www.interstate-guide.com

Interstate 91 - Interstate-Guide

Interstate 91 connects New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut with the picturesque Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.
www.interstate-guide.com www.interstate-guide.com

As an aside, I will never stop getting amused at how MA 57 and MA 83 form one of theose pretty perfectly straight lines on a map, but thanks to the bluff there, the South End Bridge deadends there, requiring a trip through the sinous set of ramps to continue straight. Real nice planning there.
 
Last edited:
Sorry for the tangent, but, it generated such thoughtful replies that it does seem like there should be a new thread topic here,

"Viaducts/Elevated Arteries And Their Impacts On Downtowns/Urbanism"

(or something along those lines), and these first few posts could serve as the springboard to a larger discussion, perhaps.

Finally, I'm embarrassed to realize I overlooked Worcester's--and is Springfield's in fact worse than Wormtown's? And which is harder to remedy, in terms of adjacent rail infrastructure, etc., that would have to be reconciled?

(I'm referring of course to how I-290 amputates the Downtown core from the Shrewsbury St. corridor, which to my understanding was revitalizing nicely, pre-COVID)
 
Like in Springfield, the rail lines already separated Shrewsbury St from the rest of Downtown. And before the railroad, it was the Blackstone Canal separating it. With that said, there is at least the draw of Union Station to help bridge the gap. The station is surprisingly well connected for being surrounded by rail viaducts on 2 sides and 290 on the third. The 290 viaduct is high enough since it had to jump over the rail viaduct that there is still some visual connection between Shrewsbury St and the station
 
Bids are in for Fall River Secondary Construction, goal is to have it awarded at Monday's FMCB if all the paperwork can be ironed out in time. $6 million below budget: https://bc.mbta.com/business_center/bidding_solicitations/bid_responses/?cnumber=K78CN03

This bid includes 11 Miles of Track ▪ 2 New Stations ▪ 1 Layover Facility ▪ 8 Bridges ▪ 10 Grade Crossings ▪ 10 Culverts ▪ Systems ▪ Infrastructure

Freetown.PNG
FRS.PNG


Bidding is due to start on the New Bedford Main Line and Middleboro Secondary portion this month, and close in June
 
Yep, SCR is 100% high platforms. There's plenty of room at the station sites, so they have passing tracks for freight when needed, as there's no way they would have got an exemption for mini-highs. Unfortunately, they haven't repeated the clever design from the Old Colony Lines where the parking lots were level with the platforms - no steps or ramps required. It's also disappointing to see canopies covering only a short section of the platform with almost zero windbreaks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top