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Yes. Via street-running on Pearl St. Here's a diagram showing a multi-directional configuration (i.e. Huntington trains being thru-routeable onto the D, and South Huntington trains being routeable from Kenmore). An E-to-D train would proceed straight from Huntington to Washington, turn onto...

That's where the Atlantic Ave. El connected with the Washington St. El, the lead to the Chinatown Orange Line portal, and the former lead to the 1901-08 re-route through the Tremont St. tunnel. It was formally known as Tower D Junction. The last remnants of it came down in 1987. This is what...

You aren't mixing Green Line trolleys and Blue Line HRT cars on the same tracks. A collision between the two would be nasty because of the wildly different centers of gravity. HRT car striking the trolley would kill/maim the trolley operator in the cabin, and the high-slung HRT car might...

If the Providence Line is running :30 service via Pawtucket and gets its permanent terminus extended to T.F. Green, you'd only need a matching pair of hourlies to give Pawtucket-Warwick :15 service with the triple-overlap. South County definitely isn't dense enough for :30 service, and it's...

Straight EMU's these days all have small batteries for preventing 'gapping' under short dead sections, so there'd be no need for BEMU's and true discontinuous electrification. The bigger issue here is the service levels. Does Providence-Woonsocket really merit better than hourly service? The...

I can't for the life of me fathom why they are placing Thompson's Point layover on such a pedestal. It hasn't been used as a regular yard ever since the Brunswick extension opened and shifted the maint base out there. It only takes very occasional non-revenue equipment extras, which is hardly an...

The Mountain Branch will be a rail trail before they're ever ready to entertain the option of east-west rail. Frankly, the more time they waste studying this at arm's length the less time they spend figuring out the logistics of an easily effective express bus. Analysis paralysis FTW, and it's...

Can't. Third rail maxes out at 750 volts vs. the 25,000 volts of overhead because of ground proximity. You'd need wildly different electrification schemes, separate substations, and expensive dual-electrification vehicles. It's honestly cheaper to just brute-force the clearances.

Charles River has a 6 MPH speed limit west of BU Bridge, 10 MPH limit east because of the no-wake zone. There's no way they're physically doing this run in under an hour even if it were nonstop.

It's not marshland. It's remediated industrial drainage ponds from a quarry that closed 35 years ago. North of the tracks where New York Life is used to be a gas tank farm until the early-90's. Stony Brook is the only natural feature in that whole area. It's all more-than-fine for EIS'ing...

I don't think the complaining here (at least on the last page-plus) is about the lack of "fancyness" in the plans. It's more that what they're proposing is completely, utterly inadequate for the passenger loading of existing Portland train ridership. By an order of magnitude. In addition to...

:15 everywhere is definitely excessive for the density of the average past-128 stop. I can't imagine 8 TPH is going to catch flies at the Kingston sand pit or outside-downtown Newburyport parking lot, much less at the Hansons and Norfolks of the system. So many of the outer-zone stations are...

You're capped at 110 MPH (Class 6) anywhere there are grade crossings. 125 (Class 7) and above requires a totally sealed corridor. So that eliminates almost the entirety of the not-NEC system from true "high speed" contention immediately. The Fairmount Line is the only not-NEC sealed corridor...

It's because the lots are apportioned with resident permit parking taking up a large percentage of the total spaces. Any town resident who spends $200/yr. for an on-street permit sticker can park at the station free of charge in the designated spaces, while there are too few regular-rate spots...

The T has placemarked it on the Rail Vision as "I-95 Station" and as a requirement for the Urban Rail :15 option to Waltham because the existing stops at Waltham and Brandeis aren't configured well for easy turnbacks. That's a little short of a discrete build proposal, but they are well aware...

EMU's compact the schedules lots, but their presence alone doesn't impact TPH too much because just about every line needs at least *some* infrastructure upgrades to do better than today. The Rail Vision targets :15 service (at least 8 TPH) for the inside-128 zone and for mainlines out to their...

"Amshack" is of course a pejorative characterization of Amtrak's standard station program of the 1970's and 1980's, with their cookie-cutter dated boxy architecture. But the point I was trying to make is that the stations were standardized with amenities and required square footage vs...

That's not even an Amshack by official definition. :(

Calm down. Just because all parts of the railway each have a rated "Mean Time Between Failures" doesn't mean that a failure won't happen far apart from the mean time. A rail joint popping out is the epitome of a random event. It can happen on brand new third rail, and not happen on worn out...

Broken joint on the third rail that tore off the third rail shoes on the train when the askew blunt end of the out-of-alignment piece of third rail struck the shoes. Relatively minor in the grand scheme of things (shoes are 'consumables' so the shop can replace the broken ones instantly), but...