Recent content by Brattle Loop

I think the article is mistaken. Until they stopped printing them, the Lake Shore Limited schedules invariably listed Worcester as a discharge-only stop on the eastbound Boston section (train 448) but not a receiving-only stop on westbound train 449. Meaning that from the schedule it at least...

Pan Am Southern is half-owned by CSX and half NS. Or, at least it was, I didn't think that had changed. Still true that CSX doesn't directly own the PAS tracks.

Weren't some of those filled in at some point when the LRVs came, to deal with the extra weight? I'd swear I read that somewhere (though it'd be nice if I could remember where).

Pretty sure she still has the same ten days, but the bill is just dead if she doesn't sign it. (Also known as a pocket veto, mainly a constitutional quirk because the legislature having adjourned means she couldn't return the bill - a normal veto - even if she wanted to.)

I think it's a higher standard, but maybe it should be. That might depend on, practically speaking, whether southern/western-originating riders would be significantly better-off time-wise taking that transfer versus transferring downtown. (Northern end riders would be way better off going Orange...

Might be Illustrator having trouble rasterizing the lower-case "r"s on export. The angled terminals of the lower-case R in Arial don't play very nice with adjacent letters, especially at small sizes, and I think having to rasterize that text is making the problem worse. My commute used to run...

Probably not worth the effort. There's already Logan Express service to Danvers and Woburn (the latter to the CR stop at Anderson RTC) and those run a much more convenient schedule than the Commuter Rail. Part of the point of the Back Bay service (and this would be true to some extent of Kendall...

The CRRC cars are a particularly bad example for all the reasons @HenryAlan and others have mentioned. The Patrick administration's insistence on them being assembled in Massachusetts (i.e. Springfield) immediately made the project less attractive to all of the potential bidders who had...

I agree it's probably something to do with the font, though if that doesn't fix it I've sometimes managed to fix Illustrator font-rendering issues with the "create outlines" function to convert the text to objects, I think Illustrator has less trouble rendering those consistently.

North Station's platforms are longer, but Government Center's absolutely can fit two two-car trains, they used to do it all the time. (I presume that went away after one of the Green Line's collisions.) Even when they had two trains stop simultaneously, it only helped when a Lechmere-bound train...

I like the double-line effect giving, effectively, greater presence to the bus lines, and thus more emphasis than the decidedly secondary treatment they get from the official map, and I get the intention of having them get put on a similar plane. That said, because of that plus the colors, I...

Obviously a ton of work's gone into this, so I'm a touch hesitant to immediately dump a bucket of cold water, but I'm getting major NYC Subway map vibes, and not in a good way. The double-thickness bus routes concept is, I think, quite a good way of visually indicating something that's more...

The whole point of the leadership and the committee system is to have the ability to coordinate things so that legislating isn't a constant ad hoc process. There's 40 members of the Senate, 160 in the House, it's not exactly easy to get them to agree on all that much of anything most of the...

Yeah, we will see how that goes. Part of the problem is that they had to cut the raised platform back because of how far the fronts of the cars stick out on that sharp curve. and there's still going to be at least some of that on the T10s, so I'm not completely confident.

Probably not. I have a sneaking suspicion the problem is the gap between the platform and the doors, which is enormous because of how sharp the curve on the loop is. (When they raised the platform in the renovation, they subsequently had to cut the raised platform back near the cinderblock wall...