Crazy Transit Pitches

[Charlie_mta]

I've always envisioned this route of a phase 1 of an elevated light rail (call it the pink line) that ran above route 16 from Beachmont to Wellington. Most of the elevated support poles would be in the median of 16, and some stations or tracks would be on side grass embankments.

This would easily link blue to orange and serve the growing Everett developments on the former gas tanks plots, connect the growing developments along 16 (Stop and Shop Mixed use), and then serve as an effective service for the Suffolk Downs developments.

Understandably, this is never going to happen, but it would be amazing in a fantasy world. It would reduce a lot of car dependency in this area, and probably relieve some route 16 traffic too.

I wonder if any busses provide similar service?

I was thinking something similar, except the line would be a GL branch connecting to the GLX via Sullivan Sq and Sweetser Circle, and then continuing as an elevated line above Revere Beach Pkwy from Sweetser Circle to the Beachmont station. There would also be another GL branch going north into Everett, branching off this line at Sweetser Circle.

 

[AndrewOnTheMBTA]

I was thinking something similar, except the line would be a GL branch connecting to the GLX via Sullivan Sq and Sweetser Circle, and then continuing as an elevated line above Revere Beach Pkwy from Sweetser Circle to the Beachmont station. There would also be another GL branch going north into Everett, branching off this line at Sweetser Circle.

I think about how important more transport to Beachmont especially is -- there will probably be 20K new residents added to just Suffolk Downs alone. Of that number, the commuters into the city should be significant enough to increase BL ridership. I imagine some jobs will be in Suffolk Downs, but others will commute elsewhere- including Somerville, Cambridge too

 

[Riverside]

I think about how important more transport to Beachmont especially is -- there will probably be 20K new residents added to just Suffolk Downs alone. Of that number, the commuters into the city should be significant enough to increase BL ridership. I imagine some jobs will be in Suffolk Downs, but others will commute elsewhere- including Somerville, Cambridge too

Out of curiosity, does the 20K number come from any particular official plan?

 

[AndrewOnTheMBTA]

Out of curiosity, does the 20K number come from any particular official plan?

I'm actually estimating based on what I've read in the past. I'd have to check their plans again for the more accurate number

 

[Tallguy]

In terms of far-future possibilities, would it ever make sense to build a Springfield <-> Worcester regional rail line? (separate from the Worcester Line, not an extension of it.) A commuter service between Springfield and Worcester would connect Central Mass and the Knowledge Corridor with frequent (hourly?) service. The main advantage compared to Amtrak's future Inland Route trains would be service to suburban/exurban towns between Springfield and Worcester (Wilbraham, Ludlow, Warren, the Brookfields, Charlton, and Leicester), which will never be stops on an Amtrak schedule. State ownership of the B&A and/or triple tracking would obviously be necessary for something like this. A Springfield <-> Worcester commuter service stopping in the suburbs/exurbs that Amtrak skips would also help ease Pike traffic. We could build this regional rail service instead of eventually widening the Pike between Sturbridge and Springfield from 4 lanes to 6. This kind of service might also alleviate some of the concerns from Western Mass pols and residents about transit funding being too skewed towards trains and the MBTA, since they currently don't have much train service, aside from CTRail and Amtrak. Western/Central Mass residents would have more of a reason to support public transit funding and expansion if they had better rail transit in their own communities.

Something like this:
View attachment 63556

There's probably enough demand for a westward extension to West Springfield and Westfield, but the huge CSX yard in West Springfield might be too much of an obstacle for any commuter service west of Union Station in Springfield.View attachment 63557

Schedule mockup:
View attachment 63581

Transitmatters original proposal was for an MBTA operated, commuter oriented, frequent service, with the T buying the tracks from CSX when they were trying to get approval for the PanAm purchase. Didn't propose as many stops though.

 

[themissinglink]

Transitmatters original proposal was for an MBTA operated, commuter oriented, frequent service, with the T buying the tracks from CSX when they were trying to get approval for the PanAm purchase. Didn't propose as many stops though.

Do you have a link to the TransitMatters plan? I'm curious to see what they were proposing.

 

[Charlie_mta]

Here's an idea I have for untangling the Alewife bus exit onto the Concord Turnpike (Rte 2). Very simple and cheap, requiring no new bridges or roadways. Simply make the existing access road from the Concord Turnpike into a two-way bus-only route. It is already two-lanes, so no widening would be required. This plan would cut off the direct access to Alewife for eastbound car traffic into the station, but it would offset that loss with greatly improved bus access, avoiding the tangled mess at the Rte 2/Rte 16 intersection. This would seem to be fairly NIMBY compliant. Here it is:

 

[TheRatmeister]

Arguably stretching the definition of 'crazy' here but here's the pitch: Completely remake Massachusetts into a railroad state. Reactivate loads of old lines, and encourage dense yet decentralized development in existing railroad villages, towns, and cities that are small but relatively dense. Think Clinton, Palmer, Ayer, Gardner, Shirley, Pepperell, Webster, Ware, Housatonic, etc. The smaller villages and towns would become communities built around cores of duplexes and triple deckers, supported by retail and light industries. Larger cities and junction towns would lean more into commerical/lab/office space, becoming regional job centers. All supported by the network of lines allowing for at least 4-6 trips per day between any destination pair. Here's the very crude MyMaps I've made for the proposal, the next step will be making a nice diagrammatic Illustrator map with actual service patterns shown.

 

[The EGE]

A pitch from 1892: a suburban rail line from Newton Highlands to Dorchester. it was intended to give the New York and New England Railroad's Woonsocket Division a direct link to its main line (now the Fairmount Line), rather than relying on the Boston and Albany Railroad to reach Boston. (The NY&NE had sold the Newton Highlands-Brookline section to the B&A a decade prior.) It's distinctly an ancestor of the Needham Cutoff, which the New Haven built 15 years later for the same purpose, though the Needham Cutoff wasn't intended to open substantial new commuting territory.

It's interesting to imagine the effects had it opened. On one hand, it wouldn't have hit a single village center; the densest areas it did hit were already well-served by other lines. On the other hand, it may have succeeded in opening up territory for development. I doubt it would have ever been converted to rapid transit. Most interesting would have been the cascading effects on rail development with the Needham Cutoff never built.

The overextended NY&NE would certainly have still fallen under the New Haven later that decade, and the New Haven would probably have built a connector at Forest Hills for Woonsocket Division trains to serve Back Bay (as was done at Readville for main line trains). Unless it became a belt line for freight, the section east of Forest Hills probably wouldn't have lasted long into the streetcar era. Without the Needham Cutoff, the West Roxbury Branch would have been much weaker; it would have been cut or taken over by the Orange Line. Or perhaps West Roxbury service would have been routed over the eastern half of the new route.

 

[vanshnookenraggen]

Has anyone ever proposed converting the Red Line Braintree Branch to regional rail? This would solve the single-track issue limiting Old Colony Lines. This would likely only be practical after the North-South Link is built to provide needed through service.

 

[ball_square]

Has anyone ever proposed converting the Red Line Braintree Branch to regional rail? This would solve the single-track issue limiting Old Colony Lines. This would likely only be practical after the North-South Link is built to provide needed through service.

Yeah, I had raised that idea and there was some interesting discussion that followed.

Here's an idea to tear apart...

Current state of the Braintree branch: RL trains every 15/21mins (on/off peak).

TransitMatters' Old Colony Rail proposal: RR (regional rail) trains to run Braintree->SS every 7/15mins, based on the overlap of the Middleborough and Hyannis (Kingston) lines. Headways improve to 5/10mins for QuincyCenter->SS once the Greenbush line merges in.

PROPOSAL: Abandon the Braintree Red Line branch, relying on RR frequencies instead.

Benefits:

• Former Braintree RL capacity goes to the Ashmont branch, which currently suffers 15/21min headways, even though the density is comparable to what the northern RL serves in Cambridge.
• Simplified RL ops.
• One of the former Braintree RL tracks between Quincy and JFK can be used to double-track the mainline, decreasing the cost of the Old Colony RR project, which currently requires building a new mainline track.
• The other unused Braintree RL track could be used for passing, freight(??), or converted to a bike path.
• Avoid the cost of running and maintaining redundant service between RL and Old Colony RR.

Downsides:

• Several RL stations would need conversion: Braintree, all 4 Quincy stops, and JFK.
• Braintree branch riders bound for Andrew and Broadway would now need to transfer from RR to RL at JFK.
• Unless NSRL includes the Old Colony lines (which I believe the latest study doesn't), all points north of SS would also require transfer from RR to RL. But maybe this would give reason include the Old Colony lines in the NSRL.

 

[Charlie_mta]

Has anyone ever proposed converting the Red Line Braintree Branch to regional rail? This would solve the single-track issue limiting Old Colony Lines. This would likely only be practical after the North-South Link is built to provide needed through service.

I really like the idea. It may not have to wait for the NSRL if South Station's capacity is increased by tearing down the USPS building and adding platforms with some of that space

 

[Longfellow]

I was shocked in Italy when there were local electric trains and interstate electric trains on the same tracks. What a concept!

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Has anyone ever proposed converting the Red Line Braintree Branch to regional rail? This would solve the single-track issue limiting Old Colony Lines. This would likely only be practical after the North-South Link is built to provide needed through service.

Bad idea. There are too many trip pairs that go to points DTX-Park-MGH and Cambridge from Quincy and Braintree that would have no equivalent through an NSRL alignment, as well as much more constipated transfers to other lines because of how far underground and askew from existing stations NSRL is going to be. A lot of demand to those points has built up over the last 54 years.

The single-tracking fix will be fixed loooong before NSRL is built. The state's already committed CIP money for a study, and the T has highlighted that as a high-priority long-term project. So in reality the conditions for a Braintree Branch conversion to Regional Rail are never going to arise...the pinch will be fixed somehow, some way long before.

 

[ScollayUnder]

Has anyone ever proposed converting the Red Line Braintree Branch to regional rail? This would solve the single-track issue limiting Old Colony Lines. This would likely only be practical after the North-South Link is built to provide needed through service.

It's the inverse of that idea that seems interesting to me: figuring out a way for some of the Old Colony line traffic to run onto the Red Line. I know the railroad safety regulatory structure in the United States doesn't allow rapid transit equipment and main line railroad equipment to share the same track. But, the Red Line specifically is built to a very large loading gauge (IIRC, about as large as a passenger train of the 1910s?) and seems like if you could come to some understanding about safety when mixing metro/subway and mainline passenger trains as other countries have... Japan specifically comes to mind, then a solution instead could be to figure out how to get some of the Old Colony traffic onto the two Red Line tracks. Probably all the Greenbush traffic and at least perhaps the inner suburban traffic through to Brockton or Bridgewater on the New Bedford/Fall River line?

Without all that much investment in new infrastructure this concept could connect Old Colony traffic through to the Fitchburg line, too. I'm not sure how much of a success the idea of Brockton-Waltham electrified local service, routed through the Red Line from Porter to Braintree, would be... but it could be done using a lot of what is already there if it weren't for the current regulations that strictly prevent main line trains and rapid transit trains running together. It would also require it be economical to electrify the lesser-used sections of lines that would be operating through into the Red Line, whuch might unfortunately be a stretch in the US as well. It's a far fetched idea but it's one that rattles around my head a lot.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

It's the inverse of that idea that seems interesting to me: figuring out a way for some of the Old Colony line traffic to run onto the Red Line. I know the railroad safety regulatory structure in the United States doesn't allow rapid transit equipment and main line railroad equipment to share the same track. But, the Red Line specifically is built to a very large loading gauge (IIRC, about as large as a passenger train of the 1910s?) and seems like if you could come to some understanding about safety when mixing metro/subway and mainline passenger trains as other countries have... Japan specifically comes to mind, then a solution instead could be to figure out how to get some of the Old Colony traffic onto the two Red Line tracks. Probably all the Greenbush traffic and at least perhaps the inner suburban traffic through to Brockton or Bridgewater on the New Bedford/Fall River line?

Without all that much investment in new infrastructure this concept could connect Old Colony traffic through to the Fitchburg line, too. I'm not sure how much of a success the idea of Brockton-Waltham electrified local service, routed through the Red Line from Porter to Braintree, would be... but it could be done using a lot of what is already there if it weren't for the current regulations that strictly prevent main line trains and rapid transit trains running together. It would also require it be economical to electrify the lesser-used sections of lines that would be operating through into the Red Line, whuch might unfortunately be a stretch in the US as well. It's a far fetched idea but it's one that rattles around my head a lot.

Red cars are smaller than RR cars. They're about the same width, 2 inches shorter in height than an MBTA single-level, 1 inch taller in door height, and a full 16 feet shorter in length for a much sharper turn radius. Red has a weight limit of no more than 125,000 lbs. while the T's roster of Commuter Rail cars run up to 131,000 lbs. and typical EMU's can be 140,000 lbs. or more. Not to mention the electrification schemes--600 V DC vs. 25 kV AC--are wildly different in capacities, weight, and required component space. You would never, ever be able to physically interline them on the Red Line network, especially the car weights and turning radius.

 

[ScollayUnder]

Not talking about the current equipment, this is crazy transit pitches after all!

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Not talking about the current equipment, this is crazy transit pitches after all!

There's no middle-ground equipment that'll work. Shortening Commuter Rail cars to 69½ feet means you lose all the space on the underside that fits the 25 kV AC transformer guts, and you already have no room to put it on the roof instead. You can't (especially with the electronics involved) shave enough weight differential to make it kosher for the weight ratings of the circa 1912 tunnel and circa 1900 Longfellow Bridge without compromising the buff strength to the point where it's no longer safe to interline with common-carrier RR traffic like Amtrak and freights. You can't re-electrify the Red tunnel at 25 kV...there's no safe electrical clearance in the tunnel for that at either third rail or overhead to prevent arcing at that voltage. You can't electrify Commuter Rail at 600 V DC...it's incompatible with Amtrak on the NEC for highest-ridership Providence/Stoughton, and you'd have to build a substation every 4 miles or so for 600 V vs. the 30-mile average of 25 kV so there's absolutely enormous component and land-siting costs for the scale of our Commuter Rail system.

It's not poundable into the same-size hole with an imaginative-enough crazy pitch. The systems are too divergently different in specs to have a workable middle ground.

 

[Stlin]

Here's a different crazy pitch take... what if we build SCR phase 2 (with full double track through the hockomock), then unload one of the OC branches from the OC mainline? Doing SCR phase 2 properly is still going to be less invasive than trying to shiv another track through Quincy, so I'm thinking we extend the Red Line into Brockton, which is the biggest population density node on OC as far as Campello - in a Regional Rail Universe we're looking at trains to Brockton every 15, roughly in line with current off peak frequencies on the RL branches - in an expanded service universe, approximately half of the trains can terminate and turn at Braintree, with the other half continuing along the corridor. The corridor is mostly grade separated, with only 5 grade crossings to treat, 4 of which in Holbrook appear fairly straightforward, and the remaining one in Braintree would be difficult, but not impossible.

Admittedly this would both raise questions about NEC capacity (presumably acceptable given the SCR phase 2 routing) and beggar Bridgewater and Lakeville. Even in a regional rail universe they were looking at 30min frequencies, so I'd suggest a Campello - East Taunton Dinky. Cape service can be provided by a reverse service pattern to current SCR - running down the Stoughton branch and turning down the Middleboro secondary.

*I realize one of the biggest obstacles is the existing freight service still existing on the Route, but can't that be served from the south via Middleboro as a single track? It seems as if segments of this previously existed as Triple track, and restoring that here seems less invasive than through Quincy.

 

[Riverside]

My recollection is that the destination of a lot of the freight service in the area is the Quincy Shipyard on the Fore River. Unfortunately, that means it needs to cross the paths of all three OCR branches if originating from the national rail network (and not traveling via Boston).

So you basically have to maintain at least one freight track along the Middleboro Line, plus at least a little bit on the Greenbush Line, far enough to enable the reverse move onto the branch line. Triple tracking the Middleboro doesn't seem impossible, but it's definitely not trivial, particularly in Brockton. Once upon a time, maybe you could have maintained/rebuilt the connection between the Randolph Branch and Stoughton, and used that for freight...

...but much of that ROW is a ghost today:

There's some underlying tension in the idea of Red-eats-OCR too: rapid transit presumably should go where there is highest density and demand, but that would (I believe) be along the Middleboro Line which a) is the path to Cape Cod, and I don't think Red-to-Hyannis really makes sense, and b) sees relatively high ridership all the way to Middleboro, over 30 miles from downtown. BART does that, but arguably as the exception that proves the rule that rapid transit isn't well-suited to those distances.

I think the Cape Cod issue really is the most acute here, unfortunately. Red-to-Brockton seems like the strongest idea of the mix, but where do Hyannis trains go if the Red Line eats the ROW to Brockton? Even if you could triple-track, that still means lengthy single track segments for the Regional Rail line, which doesn't seem good.

The only idea I've managed to scrounge up is to route outer Middleboro trains over the long-abandoned East Bridgewater Branch to join up with the Kingston/Plymouth Line.

But... like the Randolph Branch south of Randolph, this ROW barely exists anymore either.

In all of these cases, the alternative being compared to is something like 7 miles max of double tracking in Boston and Quincy. The East Bridgewater Branch alone is something like 6 miles, and you'd have all the costs of Red-to-Brockton. In terms of solving the bottleneck issue, I don't think the cost-benefit analysis works out well. (Now, if you wanted to come at this from the angle of extending the Red Line to Brockton on its own merits, I think you'd have a stronger case, but it's still a tall order.)

Also worth noting that I count 22 crossings on the Greenbush Line, and 24 crossings on the Kingston Line (excluding Plymouth Branch which has several more over a short stretch). That's a bunch of grade crossings that need separation if the Red Line were to eat either of those. (The Middleboro Line, for its part, has much better grade separation through Brockton.) These would not be inexpensive conversions.