MassDOT Rail: Springfield Hub (East-West, NNERI, Berkshires, CT-Valley-VT-Quebec)

[The EGE]

The Hoosac, rather infamously, took 25 years and >100 lives to be completed. A significant part of that was the geological conditions, including water-logged rocks that don't hold shape well. Even with modern equipment, as F-Line indicated, it would still be a very difficult tunneling job.

The Gotthard Base Tunnel, which is about 20% shorter than a Chatham-Woronoco tunnel (bypassing all the major curves between Springfield and Albany) would be, cost $12 billion a decade ago. With US costs and inflation, it would be double that. That's a tunnel with ~200 freight trains and ~60 passenger trains per day to justify the expense. Even a bypass following the Pike with shorter tunnels and viaducts would probably be in the $5B range.

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it's so far down on the priority list that I can't forsee it ever being seriously discussed. The value proposition is just so much higher on the eastern half of the corridor. The Boston-Worcester segment is relatively straight and flat; you could make it exceptionally good with conventional changes (grade separations, minor curve straightenings, triple track, electrification, full-length high-level platforms, etc). You can probably carve out enough third-track passing sidings east of Riverside that you don't need to megaproject take a Pike lane. Even the Worcester-Springfield could be pretty decent with the same sort of changes.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

The Hoosac, rather infamously, took 25 years and >100 lives to be completed. A significant part of that was the geological conditions, including water-logged rocks that don't hold shape well. Even with modern equipment, as F-Line indicated, it would still be a very difficult tunneling job.

Also, infamously, B&M and Pan Am were never ever able to get railroad insurance coverage for the Hoosac after it was acquired from the Fitchburg RR in 1900. So it's always been an unusually expensive route to operate and maintain because they don't have any standard coverage for outages caused by cave-ins and have to carry all the risk on their own backs. That bit them in the butt as recently as 2020, when a large series of cave-ins forced all Pan Am Southern traffic to detour through Vermont and the Connecticut River valley for weeks at big loss of revenue due to Canadian Pacific, Vermont Rail System, and NECR all getting their cut as detour hosts. The Hoosac is not unsafe to daily-operate because the tunnel gets thoroughly inspected with great regularity and they've got extensive electronic monitoring of the rock conditions to notice a looming problem before it risks a cave-in. But if it weren't for there being 2 Class I freight powerhouses competing for New England, it probably wouldn't still be in operation today because it's such a pain-in-the-ass to maintain while the stet B&A is relatively unrestricted (there's a car count limit over the Berkshires if you don't have mid-set or rear helper locomotives in the consist, but the line's grades are entirely within FRA-spec sub-2% even when the grades themselves are miles and miles long). When the U.S. government extended an invite to the then-bankrupt B&M to join newly-formed Conrail in the mid-70's, thru freight routings were to be consolidated exclusively over the B&A with the Greenfield-North Adams section of the Fitchburg main--including the tunnel--abandoned entirely. B&M refused the invite, opting to reorganize itself (ultimately successfully) out of bankruptcy, but if history had been different the tunnel would have been gone for 50 years as of this year. And it probably would not be a rail trail today because of the same expense to maintain.

Berkshires geology sucks that much. Again...the peaks tend to cluster up by North Adams where the Hoosac has an uninterrupted 5-mile path straight on through. Near Pittsfield and the B&A it's smaller, narrower peaks with a lot of glacial fill in-between. Total geological meat grinder in terms of sucking up cost blowouts from unforeseen circumstances and needing to constantly engineer around a shitty water table.

The Gotthard Base Tunnel, which is about 20% shorter than a Chatham-Woronoco tunnel (bypassing all the major curves between Springfield and Albany) would be, cost $12 billion a decade ago. With US costs and inflation, it would be double that. That's a tunnel with ~200 freight trains and ~60 passenger trains per day to justify the expense. Even a bypass following the Pike with shorter tunnels and viaducts would probably be in the $5B range.

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it's so far down on the priority list that I can't forsee it ever being seriously discussed. The value proposition is just so much higher on the eastern half of the corridor. The Boston-Worcester segment is relatively straight and flat; you could make it exceptionally good with conventional changes (grade separations, minor curve straightenings, triple track, electrification, full-length high-level platforms, etc). You can probably carve out enough third-track passing sidings east of Riverside that you don't need to megaproject take a Pike lane. Even the Worcester-Springfield could be pretty decent with the same sort of changes.

That wouldn't come close to amortizing itself for what extreme-modest passenger demand exists through the Berkshires or to Albany. And, honestly, the freight revenues in this region still aren't dense enough (even with the B&A being New England's #1 lane) for that tag-team to work on the revenue side either in the unlikely event such a tunnel works project built the Berkshires bypass to double-stack-under-wires clearances. Switzerland definitely had existential reasons and very big and very clear revenue paths for pursuing the Gotthard Base Tunnel. We don't. Not even in a completists' universe, because there'll always be something more you can do for the same money to optimize east-of-Springfield where the bulk of the passenger traffic is...and eventually if you optimize east-of-Springfield enough the overall Albany travel times get better enough on their own. NEC FUTURE already looked at things like using the Sudbury Aqueduct ROW to alt-spine an HSR line east of Worcester. Their assumptions proved to be a little naive on closer analysis, which is why that alt-spine alignment got defeated in the first round of scoping on cost-benefit grounds. But at least they were looking in the somewhat-right place to wad up the most performance improvement to the most number of trains.