Search results

  1. F

    I-90 Interchange Improvement Project & West Station | Allston

    The relevant grant was for $335M, about one-sixth the total project budget. It hurts for sure, but it's not fatal. And the fact that the project is such a godawful mess of infighting and conflicting design decisions right now means the chances of it actually getting construction starts within...
  2. F

    Grounding the McGrath

    No, it's not. The affected funding for McGrath totals $43.2M. That's not un-replaceable.
  3. F

    New Red and Orange Line Cars

    NETransit has 8 of the 01600-series cars yanked out of the retirement line and "held for repair" now. Those band-aids are probably designed to address the 4-car situation, as they're slowing the rate of retirements. Before that move they weren't repairing anything that was out-of-service, and...
  4. F

    New Red and Orange Line Cars

    Not really. They've been averaging 2 cars per month per line, with Orange now only needing 12 more cars/6 more months to complete deliveries. Then Red will go to 4 cars per month at no net gain for deliveries, which would net +48 for calendar year 2026. They're actually projecting a little...
  5. F

    Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail (South Coast Rail)

    Baker left office quite popular overall, but it's noteable that the last approval-rating polling that was done had him deep underwater on the issue of transportation. His mishandling of the MBTA definitely sticks to him.
  6. F

    Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail (South Coast Rail)

    The bridge work is wadded up in the 24/140 interchange rebuild, since it's a MassHighway not MBTA bridge.
  7. F

    Regional Rail (RUR) & North-South Rail Link (NSRL)

    Simple explanation: most of those recent-era upstart systems sited their maintenance yards at disused former freight yard properties. It helped that from the 1970's to the 1990's the major Class I carriers did a lot of freight yard consolidations in the name of greater efficiency, so the "small...
  8. F

    Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail (South Coast Rail)

    The problem is there's not much they can do about overall weekday reliability without cutting service. The schedule is already as tight as can possibly fit on the Old Colony main...too tight for credulity, in fact. Gapping out the trains to neutralize the potential for cascading delays is the...
  9. F

    Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail (South Coast Rail)

    Boston-Newport locals used to take 2:05 via the Stoughton route in the NYNH&H days, with Fall River-Newport itself taking nearly 40 minutes. That's considerably longer than the 1:45 it takes to do Boston-Wickford, and considerably longer than the 1:30 or so it would take to do Wickford under...
  10. F

    Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail (South Coast Rail)

    Gloucester Draw has 2 bascules, one for each track. Sakonnet would only have one track and one bascule, so it's half the overall complexity. The bridges are similar overall length with approach spans. Gloucester also attempted, before the condition of the old bridge was deemed too severe to...
  11. F

    Acela & Amtrak NEC (HSR BOS-NYP-WAS and branches only)

    I don't think the TGV cars tilt, though the Aveila Horizon design is modular enough that tilt options are available for purchase. The Amtrak carriages are based on the older single-level Alstom AGV family, married to the power cars from the TGV Aveilas. So it's a little bit of a mongrel...
  12. F

    Acela & Amtrak NEC (HSR BOS-NYP-WAS and branches only)

    SCNF in France ordered a bi-level variation of the Aveila Liberty too, known as Aveila Horizon, for TGV. It uses the same power cars as the American version, just with a more pronounced roof hump to meet up with the slightly taller carriages. That one has a smooth transition between the power...
  13. F

    Ann & Hope Mill Conversion | Cumberland

    It was double-tracked in the past, and the '09 feasibility study proposed double-tracking everything from Valley Falls freight yard through the Cumberland Station. I checked the study...they did indeed consider an alternate Cumberland station location right at the Ann & Hope site, contingent on...
  14. F

    Ann & Hope Mill Conversion | Cumberland

    The P&W mainline is planned long-term for Woonsocket-Pawtucket-Providence commuter rail per a feasibility study done about 15 years ago that's still highly rated by RIDOT despite their slow overall progress on implementing overall intrastate commuter rail. That study earmarked a Cumberland...
  15. F

    Freight and General New England RR News

    CSX blitzing more construction upgrades to the Worcester-Ayer mainline now that the ground has thawed for Spring. . . They're doing double-stack clearance improvements for the introduction later this year of a single Norfolk Southern stacked intermodal train to Ayer. Clearing of the second...
  16. F

    Regional New England Rail (Amtrak & State DOT & NEC)

    It definitely influenced the selection of a lift instead of a bascule or another swing. Lifts can have much thinner decks than the other types of movable bridges. The render a few posts up shows the lift span having significantly thinner deck than even the approach spans.
  17. F

    Regional New England Rail (Amtrak & State DOT & NEC)

    Most of WALK's openings are barge traffic for the cement plant just north of downtown. The big marinas are mostly south of the bridge, with the few docks to the north mostly taking small boats. If the cement barges can slip under the closed bridge, it would hardly ever need to open anymore.
  18. F

    Portland Passenger Rail

    The 295 bypass didn't have a chance so long as the state was looking at it as passenger-only (or passenger + an extremely occasional baked beans delivery by SLR). It needed to be pitched as a multimodal bypass of the grade crossings for both passenger service AND all bigtime thru Pan Am...
  19. F

    New Red and Orange Line Cars

    No. Virtually all rolling stock on the system is a veritable United Nations of subcomponents, including the Canadian-built Bombardier 01800's. We'll get hit with tariffs any which way, including fabbing replacement components for the 31-year-old Bombers. The CRRC's are mostly Japanese...

Back
Top