The right way to do this is:
That's a completely false characterization of Regional Rail. Electrification with EMU's gets you an 18-20% travel time reduction end-to-end. The infills they spec are on lines that already more-or-less meet the "1 hour to 495" target for driving competitiveness, it is definitely not "5+ infills" per line as they are spread strategically throughout the system, and the infills live within the electrification travel time savings. No one's schedules gets worse...ever. And I already stated the Franklin Line is not slated for any infills because there's no new density pockets (not even bringing back Plimptonville!) to tap, so that is not a realistic thing to worry about.
It is not wasted. Because those intermediate stops do big numbers, and the end-of-the-line isn't the be-all/end-all of the mainline's existence. You also can't increase service to Forge Park without addressing the layover yard capacity of that branch. Franklin layover is far too small (and gets smaller still when the double-track project is complete), and the T can't find any other sites that don't require building the Milford extension to help out with that. The only place you can increase service right now is on the inner half of the line with Foxboro turns, and in eventually upscaling Foxboro service with the layover yard there (which can in turn take some Forge Park-Walpole-Foxboro deadheads to help out a little with the storage situation in Franklin, and buy some time for that yard re-siting while usefully increasing Forge Park service).
Yes. We already said that.
Show the math on that, please, if you're going to insist that the data you've been shown by others is faulty. All you've offered up so far is personal vibes.
No trains are being "lost" to Foxboro. Foxboro is all-additional service that didn't previously exist. Additional service that, as described above, can't right now go to Forge Park because of the hard-to-solve layover storage issues down there. It's an outright dishonest characterization of the state of affairs to make this a zero-sum game of somebody "losing" service to somebody else. As I said above, if Forge Park needs more service in the near-term then you should be advocating for more Foxboro service build-out, because a Foxboro layover yard build for maximizing that service would easily be able to triage some short-range midday deadheads with Forge Park to balance out schedules amongst shift changes and buy more time for the perma-fix for Franklin layover. Cutting somebody's service is just cutting service...NOBODY gets the spoils from that, least of all the places you're placing the value judgment on as being more worthy.
This is a big reason why I think the Milford extension is likely to happen (my guess is between 2035-2045). The Franklin layover is tiny, and significant service increases past Walpole are dependent on more storage capacity. Deadheading to/from Foxboro is fine as an interim solution, but I think the need to build a full-size layover yard in Bellingham is eventually going to force the MBTA's hand with the Milford extension.
100% agree until here. Readville needs a rebuild, and if you accept that I don't really see why all Franklin Line trains shouldn't continue on the NEC. A track arrangement like this: ↑↓↓↕↑ supports 2 Franklin tracks, two Providence Tracks, and one Amtrak express track at Readville without any flying junctions. North of Readville and on the NEC it would become: ↑↓↑, with the option to become ↑↓↓↑ if the line is ever quad-tracked to support local/express services through Hyde Park, a Mt Hope Infill, and Forest Hills.
That parcel is actually where the station in Milford was planned to go last time they looked into the extension.
I maintain my position of "NEC all the way" but without a Readville rebuild some trains on the Fairmount Line will be necessary. I think there is a strong case for stopping at at least some stations. Under the BNRD Talbot Ave has a direct high frequency bus connection to Longwood and Newmarket to Back Bay/Copley.
The T actually looked at a sand pit by Bellingham Jct. 1.5 miles past Forge Park the last time they studied the Milford extension in 1997. The ex- freight yard in Downtown Milford was a little cramped for the yard storage requirements and the would-be station, and was densely abutted so there'd be the usual complaints about the noise. It's much higher-value land to do up as station + TOD, while the sand pit is...just a desolate sand pit. Traffic modeled out just fine deadheading 4.5 miles from the terminal stop. The T could easily consider doing the layover as a solo project just for Forge Park, but it gets so close to the would-be Bellingham station that it'd be malpractice to not +1 the revenue service...and if you're doing that much you have to consider finishing the job to Milford. Given that the 2011 re-study was never completed, they really need to refresh the overall numbers and factor in ridership + ops stats for a potential Regional Rail future to have any actionable blueprint for building any parts of the job.
That Union St. parcel was the pre-1988 layover from before the Forge Park extension's opening. The T specifically got out of that cramped facility and built the current cramped facility so the parked trains got out of center downtown. It wouldn't be an option as an expansion yard given the past history. There are sites further down the Franklin Industrial Track that could potentially accommodate, but one of them is an unfunded Superfund site so that's not an option until it gets cleaned up of chemical contamination someday. And of course the town now owns the track with intention of extending the trail (though, again, because of the Superfund site's contamination onto the trackbed that's not going to happen soon either), so I doubt the T wants a fight over track access to any of those properties or else they would've bought the track themselves when CSX was dumping it.
The plan, first drawn up during the "Indigo Line" effort 10-15 years ago and now required for :15 Urban Rail, is for the Readville platform to be moved north off the Franklin-Fairmount connector to a double-track island platform whose south tip is roughly at the Milton St./Hyde Park Ave./station driveway intersection. The interlockings would be redone so terminating and thru trains can mix/match on either track of the island, so that backing-up yard freights can bypass the full-high on a side turnout (Walpole Jct.-Readville Yard is a high-and-wide clearance route), and so that the platform becomes accessible to both the Franklin-Fairmount connector and the NEC-Fairmount connector (which is used by the last Stoughton train of the night today, as well as providing a lot of easy future flex and redundancy).
I was thinking the same thing lately. It could be an LRV interurban type line, and I think the route should swing by UMass Dartmouth, which is a key destination for the region. Lots of open land in the North Dartmouth area which would make that alignment feasible.
The River Line is not exactly an aspirational target, as its schedule adherence is complete shit due to said single-tracking and has for the last 10 years been in a doom loop of ever-encroaching schedule cuts due to its unreliability begatting cuts begatting ridership losses begatting more cuts.
...which is why you don't mindlessly copy things. The River Line has too much single track, therefore a new interurban should have less single track. This does not disprove the idea of a modern interurban, it suggests the specific implementation has some flaws which are not fundamental to an interurban.
Could you not say all of these things about the Hartford Line? It's a rail line that travels between two mid-sized cities (which combined actually have fewer people than Fall River and Providence), and doesn't serve much in-between density apart from a couple pockets. And yet it has been a success. Should that have been a bus line instead?
At least for Fall River and New Bedford, this is actually just false. There are currently 19 nonstop round trips per day between Fall River and New Bedford plus another 23 stopping round trips. If that's not a 'pulse' then frankly I don't know what is. Providence to Fall River is most definitely more speculative, with only 9 daily round-trips, mostly during peak times. But given the numbers Fall River-New Bedford pulls, I'd be very surprised if it didn't work out reasonably favorably.
And where are you going to find "less single track" with a ROW out of East Providence that would have to be built rail-with-trail next to a very popular bike path, and virtually no extant ROW at all in Massachusetts. Route 103 is a 2-lane road with no parking that has no side median because of people's front yards and has driveway cuts galore in dense-ish Ocean Grove. Where are you going to fit 2 interurban tracks on a majority of this route so the frequencies aren't shit? And not spend $1.5 billion dollars trying to do it? You're pitching this as "Reasonable Transit", no? How are we not launching clear past "Crazy Transit Pitches" straight into God-mode here?
Non sequitur. I said a "195 bus". Doing the speed limit on an expressway that has very little congestion outside of Providence. There's very little density in-between making the local roads more attractive, and East Providence+Barrington+Warren already have some RIPTA coverage so their catchment would not be in this bus's wheelhouse. And why are you citing bike infrastructure as an ace-in-the-hole for this service? Do you really think Swansea, Somerset, Westport, and Dartmouth are really itching to build out their bike infrastructure to push back against the sprawl that dominates their physically very large towns?
And SRTA does indeed have ridership numbers for that corridor: https://www.srtabus.com/wp-content/uploads/SRTA_RidershipReport_FY24.pdf. The passengers per revenue hour for Route #9 is just a shade over the SRTA system average for all routes, while passengers per revenue mile is a shade under the average, and passengers per trip is a system-high...28? Which is...*fine*...for a faceless local bus route equipped with 40-footers but hardly screams "RAIL-worthy!" much less "RAIL-capacity!" And it's not growing, either...ridership was down the most of any route on the system in FY24 (an overall growth year for SRTA) and is basically flat over a longer term. With Providence to any of those points being that much more speculative because of the extreme peak orientation of their ridership...where exactly is the beef here? You're proposing more-or-less a gadgetbahn for a usage case where a bus will very clearly do.
A couple pockets???
Then I guess you'll end up being very surprised, because SRTA #9 ridership isn't blowing it out as outlined above and frequencies from Providence don't extend much beyond the peak hours pointing to a lack of all-day demand. It's several orders of magnitude shy of what will fund a rail build.
That's just about the least amount of density a line could go through between cities, because 195 was laid out to chew up wetlands and avoid what passed for built-up areas everywhere from the RI state line to touchdown in Downtown Fall River, and from exiting Downtown Fall River to entering Downtown New Bedford. And you see this developing as a "linear city"? How??? Is this unbroken urbanity supposed to be built in the same highway median through all the same wetlands and power line ROW's the highway cuts through? There's nothing to terraform or density to feasibly take root by the side of that highway. It's just a big ping between the 3 downtowns, which is empirically not enough to saturate a bus route let alone demand rail's capacity. Find the right damn tool from the transit toolbox. This ain't it.
Well, I'm on vacation in Victoria BC, and hence in a fanciful frame of mind.
Would it be worthwhile to do some modest curve straightening through Bellingham so the Milford travel times aren't too big? Or is the extension too short to make a difference?
I think that realigning the tracks in Bellingham is worth a try. Rebuilding the tracks along Depot Street for ~0.8 miles would avoid the S-curve at Bellingham Junction. But I'm not sure how the businesses on Depot Street would feel about it, since you'd be building new crossings at all of their driveways.