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No, the only timed commitment was 40 mph with no speed restrictions. The work for 50 mph was only described as "lay[ing] the groundwork". https://www.mbta.com/news/2024-07-18/major-red-line-braintree-branch-improvement-work-take-place-september-6-29-mbta

Yes, exactly. While the alignment itself is designed for 50 mph speeds, it has not been treated as such for decades. Signals will need to be adjusted to account for longer braking distances, tracks and equipment maintained to a higher degree, traction power equipment adjusted or replaced...

That's quite jarring to realize that there's no good transfer between the 39 and 1.

Yep, that was the Boston and Worcester Street Railway. It used WCSR tracks and crews from downtown Worcester to just east of Lake Quinsigamond. It was the only streetcar line entering Worcester that didn't become part of the WCSR.

Permit me a little bit of bragging: after 6 months of research and writing, I've finally finished my article on the Worcester Consolidated Street Railway. It's probably the longest thing I've ever written aside from my thesis. It has 445 sources and 42 images. (Despite that, several major...

San Francisco has a 5-year moratorium on excavations in streets that have been repaved, reconstructed, or resurfaced. There are of course exceptions for leaks/emergencies and services to new buildings, but in general it does a decent job preventing streets (especially transit lanes) from turning...

Particularly notable is the growth in weekend ridership - it's more than doubled, to the point where Saturday ridership is actually approaching weekday ridership. Weekend service went from hourly (or worse) with nearly 2-hour running times to half-hourly with 75-minute running times.

These platforms will be a lot better than what we had in the past, though:

Egleston is a little awkward because it has two sets of stops - Weld and Dimmock - that are about the same distance from the Washington/Columbus intersection. Harambee would be a bit easier since there's only the single stop pair. In general, as stop spacing increases to the point where a...

Looks great! I would suggest "Harambee Park" for the stop at Westview Street.

Now, some actual thoughts: Overall, this looks really good. Stop spacing seems mostly reasonable, and it's amazing to see red lanes the whole length with no gaps. The stop locations aren't quite at major cross streets - Woodrow, Morton, Talbot/Harvard, American Legion (except with the weird...

And here's detail views of the three options.

Since the PDF is extremely slow to open because of all the layers, here's a full-scale (12k x 3.6k) jpg copy, plus the same file split into thirds to be viewable here.

My understanding is that this is because of the variety of construction projects underway or about to start (Worcester Union Station / CP-44, Wellesley Square mini-highs, Natick Center [including track relocation], CP-16, I-495/90 interchange, and the Pike projects in Boston). I agree that the...

Commuter Rail schedules change on November 18. Only a few notable items: Fitchburg: Silver Hill returns with 2 inbound and 3 outbound stops. It adds 2 minutes to each of those rush-hour trains (in addition to 1-2 minutes added as padding on all lines). Kingston: No longer shows a timed transfer...

I would like to highly recommend "Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston". It is incredibly detailed and exhaustively researched - it's explicitly a spiritual successor to "Boston: A Topographical History", and actually corrects a few errors in it. It's also very readable and engaging...

My open-answer for that survey: 1. It is critical to prioritize housing at this location, especially since it has strong transit and bike/walk connections to major job centers and universities. This is a very rare opportunity to actually address the region's housing crisis by building dense...

I'm desperately hoping that common sense will prevail and both the neighborhood and station will be "Beacon Park".

There definitely is some smokiness after a train passes, but not as bad as either platform area at Back Bay. The 'tunnel' section is much shorter and with a more direct path for wind to clear out fumes, and locomotives are usually under Beacon Street (ie near one end). There's also somewhat...

Yeah, that's disappointing, as is the limited weekend span of service. 8:30 am start is not useful for most church services, much less people who have to work, 7:00 pm final arrival at terminals is also too early for getting dinner. I am happy to see that frequent routes, rapid transit, and...