Crazy Transit Pitches

[TheRatmeister]

How did trains do it back in the day?

With more maintenance and/or looser safety standards.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I'm pretty sure that the tracks past Buzzards Bay are jointed rail, not welded rail. If you want to go faster than 30 mph, you'd need to replace the jointed rail with continuous welded rail. It's not likely to happen until the CapeFlyer gets replaced with a full Commuter Rail schedule.

Jointed rail doesn't affect track class. You can run 90 MPH on jointed rail if it's maintained well enough, though it would obviously be a rougher ride than if you did the same on welded rail. Track classes have more to do with how many ties per X feet of track are allowed to be decayed, how tightly the rail must conform to gauge, how worn the rail is allowed to be, and so on. The joints don't really factor, because even Class 8/165 MPH tracks have *some* very occasional joints to them.

The Cape Main tracks east of the bridge are only maintained to Class 2/30 MPH, same as what the Falmouth Branch is for its very occasional Dinner Train runs. It's maximally good-condition Class 2 with fully up-to-spec grade crossings now, but still only Class 2 because of the tie replacement cycles. MassDOT was interested in slowly upgrading the on-Cape rail to Class 3/60 MPH like it has upgraded Middleboro-Buzzards Bay on the mainland since the Flyer's launch, but Cape politicians gave a hard no to that over some cognitive dissonance over the trains being unsafe to pedestrian trespassers at that speed. They thought since people routinely cross the tracks to get to the Canal path that there needed to be a forever speed limit. Really...they were offered it and said hell-no we want people to keep trespassing on the ROW. Tim Cahir, the late former CCRTA president and basically the Train Daddy of Cape Flyer's funding coalition, was really strident about it for some reason. Maybe with him gone they'll start to give it consideration.

Class 3 lets you do a speed limit of 59 MPH, the most you can do without a signal system. In the NYNH&H days the Cape was Class 4/79 MPH just like the Middleboro Line, but it didn't result in speeds higher than 50 because of the on-Cape curves. Again...Class 3-4 is more an idealized maintenance standard for commuter rail-class service and the wear-and-tear reps that entails than a be-all/end-all speed limit thing.

 

[riptide]

Again...Class 3-4 is more an idealized maintenance standard for commuter rail-class service and the wear-and-tear reps that entails than a be-all/end-all speed limit thing.

Why did the New Haven RR pay for 79 MPH track if the ROW geometry limited speeds to 50 MPH in practice? What other “bang for your buck” do you get for making that extra level of expenditure in maintenance, besides higher speeds?

 

[JeffDowntown]

Why did the New Haven RR pay for 79 MPH track if the ROW geometry limited speeds to 50 MPH in practice? What other “bang for your buck” do you get for making that extra level of expenditure in maintenance, besides higher speeds?

Continuously Welded Rail reduces the impacts and shocks of the track joints (increasingly irregular with time) on the wheels and other undercarriage components, significantly reducing rolling stock maintenance. It also provides for a smoother ride, even at the lower speed.

 

[Longfellow]

Maybe we can get some guys together next weekend and some thermite and go weld the rail. We can go to the beach after.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Why did the New Haven RR pay for 79 MPH track if the ROW geometry limited speeds to 50 MPH in practice? What other “bang for your buck” do you get for making that extra level of expenditure in maintenance, besides higher speeds?

As I said, track classes are a maintenance standard, not an aspirational speed limit. There was a lot of traffic on the Cape back in the first half of the 20th century...daily commuter rail, a fat schedule of seasonal extras, long-distance traffic from New York, lots of freight, and lots of military traffic. It was a profitable corridor for them. The number of daily movements was more befitting of Class 4 track than Class 3, so that's what they maintained the track at.

A lot of T lines don't reach above 59 MPH either because of stop spacing, but they choose to maintain the whole system at Class 4 all the same because their schedules--and the wear they put on the infrastructure--are substantial.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

It would be great if Cape Cod eventually gets Commuter Rail service past Hyannis. To avoid the brunt of the NIMBY backlash, the tracks could be laid alongside Route 6 out to the Orleans/Eastham Rotary, instead of alongside the Rail Trail.

That would depress the ridership quite a bit from a reactivation of the old ROW. You'd miss Brewster center and all the density along 6A on the north shore, be over a mile from Harwich center, and be over a half-mile from Orleans center. The Mid-Cape Expressway was laid out to mostly chew up conservation land and avoid the village centers. With these towns being intrinsically very small and there not being a lot of sidewalk or bike lane coverage on the Cape, you really need to hit the village centers that grew into village centers because of the ROW to net much of a station catchment. The ROW is legally landbanked to South Dennis, and de facto landbanked to Wellfleet. If there's truly a market for Commuter/Regional Rail-level service way out here (I much doubt it), it rises to the standard of "greater good" for displacing the bike path or meriting a more expensive rail-with-trail. If you're considering the highway because the trail is the more "valuable" use of the ROW, the plot has already been lost because that conclusion means rail's ridership potential is much too low to hack it anywhere.

There's probably more than enough demand for train service past Hyannis, as the Lower Cape's population swells during the summer:

• Yarmouth
  • Offseason pop: 25,023 (2020 census)
  • Summer pop: ~48,000 (source)
• Dennis
  • Offseason pop: 14,674 (2020 census)
  • Summer pop: ~52,000 (source)
• Harwich
  • Offseason pop: 13,440 (2020 census)
  • Summer pop: ~37,000 (source)
• Brewster
  • Offseason pop: 10,318 (2020 census)
  • Summer pop: ~30,000 (source)
• Chatham
  • Offseason pop: 6,594 (2020 census)
  • Summer pop: ~19,000 (source)
• Orleans
  • Offseason pop: 6,307 (2020 census)
  • Summer pop: ~19,000 (source)
• Eastham
  • Offseason pop: 5,752 (2020 census)
  • Summer pop: ~20,000 (source)

Not all trains would go all the way into Boston; some would short turn at Hyannis, Buzzards Bay, or maybe even Wareham. I know there's probably some specific reason why this won't work, so I'm interested to hear any feedback.

As above, a better metric rather than municipal population (almost meaningless given how physically large and spread out some of these towns are) is station catchment. Which does include things like walkability scores and major thoroughfares access. It's a much tinier slice when factored that way, below the threshold of feasibility in all likelihood. The Cape just isn't very walkable or bikeable outside of the rail trail because of the limited on-road infrastructure, and the density in those physically very large towns is scattered because the road network only pools from certain directions. The village centers, while vibrant and robust, are small in scope. The NYNH&H's previous service was so long on-the-clock in part because they had to stop at every single village center and micro-village center in order to scoop up enough ridership to make ends meet on their P-town and Chatham runs, and that simply didn't work anymore after the 1920's when most households started owning cars. You've got 6 stops east of Yarmouth Jct., most of them off-center from the villages because of the highway layout and thus needing to be park-and-ride oriented. The New Haven needed 9 over the same on-ROW distance to square its catchment math (and then another 7 to P-town). If you went on-ROW to chase the density, you'd still need more stops at more travel time to make it work.

Finally, consider where people need to go car-free...mostly on/off the Cape. The mid- and outer Cape do not generally have onerous road congestion even during the summer. Getting to Hyannis from Chatham or Orleans is not a huge ordeal, and can be done an order of magnitude faster by car than by rail which has to make a lot of stops to scoop up all those micro-catchments. Even the current local buses making many many stops only take a trivially longer amount of time than the old train used to. It's getting from Hyannis (or Falmouth) to the mainland that's an exercise in total frustration. So a stop-miserly sojurn to the east reliant on park-and-rides for ridership is not going to fetch much at all, and a short-turn is not going to fetch much at all. You would probably be able to swing bigger numbers having park-and-rides at Hyannis and west on the mainline at Sagamore and Bourne, then an upgraded CCRTA bus network and frequencies running out of Hyannis for the various village centers, then a robust/at-least-hourly Boston schedule running to Hyannis. Maybe 30-minute Regional Rail to Buzzards Bay forking at Cape Jct. to hourlies for Falmouth Depot and Hyannis. This is pretty much what the NYNH&H had in-place 85 years ago: real-deal commuter rail to Hyannis and Woods Hole, and their own in-house network of express buses and ferries everywhere else including on the islands. I think you treat the whole network with multimodal connections rather than get fixated on one mode with no more than a couple of minimally feasible patterns on it. The good news is that there's real-life advocacy to tap for the Commuter Rail to Hyannis + connecting buses everywhere else scheme, and it can be implemented shorter-term. All you really have to do is first get South Coast Rail Phase 2 un-stuck to free up Middleboro Line schedules to continue southeast, and the rest has already been studied in some form or another. No Crazy Pitches required.