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Moderate mechanical and electrical overhaul New flooring (the MBB's were prone to floor rot) New seating upholstery New replacement toilets The mods only figured to result in a 7-year projected life extension, so it's well shy of a midlife overhaul. All specialty cars to-date--bike cars, cafe...

HUH?!? The Charles River bridge doesn't have anything to do with the Pike straightening. The trajectory of the Grand Junction into the realigned highway doesn't start changing until after the Storrow overpass. It's literally well outside the project area limits. Besides, I doubt you could...

It was a pie-in-sky wishlist item on their Institutional Master Plan about 15-20 years ago, but they didn't want to pay for anything but the nice parkland on top so it's frankly never happening unless they seriously up their investment. The tunnel would've gone from near Memorial Drive to...

Track classes are first and foremost a maintenance standard. It includes things like how many bad ties per X feet are allowed, how worn the rail is allowed to be, how much the ballast is allowed to be decayed/washed-away, how much the gauge is allowed out-of-alignment, and so on. You'd never...

The 2004 North Shore Transit Improvements study proposed separating Eastern Ave. with a road-over-rail bridge to whack the 30 MPH speed restriction through there. None of the other ones have any plans, but excepting Everett Ave. next to the station eliminating the crossings isn't a big deal...

Electrifying a movable bridge is trivial. Amtrak did it with a 2 draws, 2 swings, and a lift when it electrified New Haven-Boston, and it didn't bloat the budget any.

Again...they acquired those air rights over 25 years ago from a private company that had no interest in dealing with the state, and no state where an Urban Ring Major Investment Study had yet taken place. It doesn't matter if the middle building post-dates the state's acquisition of the GJ. The...

The stakeholders need MIT's institutional support to push through a rapid transit project. You're not going to get that support by forcibly seizing their property and blowing up their buildings.

MIT acquired all those air rights in the late-90's from then line-owner Conrail (the state didn't own the GJ until 2010) when Conrail was about to be bought out and corporately dismembered. The company was just pocketing some extra money on the way out, and there were no public interests with...

CSX hasn't used it in half a decade. The line has the tightest vertical clearance in New England, and CSX had to hunt for hard-to-find shrunken reefer cars to serve it's Everett customers. They outsourced the job to Pan Am to get standard dimension Plate F cars...and now of course own PAR...

It's not one building, it's THREE: Building 46, the Building 45 rear overhang, and the power plant. LRT with traffic signals at a station stop isn't crap. You'll get your world-class rapid transit with the Main and Broadway crossings remaining. It's only Mass Ave. that must be eliminated...

The 2012 study looked at exactly that: Worcester-NS. And found less demand for it than demand continuing on the mainline to Lansdowne and Back Bay. As well very little demand on off-peak hours when the Red Line and Orange Line were functioning better for making the same trips in similar time...

You have to have gates there. It's an FRA rule for crossings above a certain train traffic threshold. And Mass Ave. (the worst crossing) is state highway 2A, so MassHighway is not going to allow you to close it to autos. What I'm saying is...the previous study found punitive delay time for...

That's going to cause more mobility problems than it's worth given the transit ridership projections vs. utilization of the roads impacted. Read the 2012 study. It did detailed traffic counts at the three major crossings, and broke it down multimodally by car, bus, pedestrian, and bike...

They don't even spec full-high 48 inch platforms. They go with 14 inch x 250 ft. LRT level-boarding platforms, meaning that the service is captive to unicorn rolling stock and requires low platforms (or low platform extensions) to be built on all the "extended"-service stations like Sullivan...

It's probably not needed. The grade crossings at Main and Broadway are at existing traffic lights. Add a transit phase and it slips as inocuously into the mix as a pedestrian phase. The traffic impacts with LRT and BRT are honestly minimal there (though Mass Ave. would still need to be...

With how cumbersome the loading/unloading is, you'd honestly make the trip faster doing a Seaport-Green Line-Urban Ring-Terminals trip the long way around via Everett-Chelsea. EDIT: Plus the headways. What's the best you could do with a ferry that had to gingerly load/unload cars...like 20...

Not a new idea. Unless you have any aims at them staying plugged into a 600V DC power source while over the water.

They can trial it today if they want. It took only a few days' shop mods to come up with the "Big Red" standee-heavy Red Line consist...and then only a few days to mod it again to put a few more seats back in. Commuter Rail has modded bike cars and the Cape Flyer cafe car. Amtrak has modded...

They also ruled it infeasible on the grounds that LRT must be on a tri-track corridor that preserves the existing RR track, which is a ridiculous claim when the Worcester-Ayer alternate route has been upgraded to 60 MPH, the southside heavy maintenance facility is in-design for Readville, the...