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There's not really going to be any inbound/outbound schedule dependencies on an express track that short. Minimum thru-Worcester headways are going to be :30 bi-directional, meaning there will only be an expressing train passing one direction or another every 15 minutes. Amtrak's tippy-top...

Here's a much saner render: No layover. Build Readville Yard 1 as permanent instead of temporary, and you net more layover spots than the crippled plan here. 1 center express track. No crossing conflicts between locals and expresses. Side platform for mainline inbound, island platform for...

The only CSX Framingham yard with slack space is the south yard, CP Yard. That's only used these days by a lone transloading customer and for temporary empties storage; about 90% of it is unused. Unfortunately that yard is only accessible by a reverse move that crosses Route 135 at-grade...

Here...here's where you zero-out the Beacon Park layover. The T has already contacted CSX for permission to construct a temporary 5-track layover yard on a weed-choked derelict portion of CSX Readville Yard 1 along the NEC that's currently unused by CSX, done while they disrupt the current...

Wait...so we've gone from this: 2 express tracks 3 station tracks 4 layover tracks (8 berths) ...to this: 2 express tracks 4 station tracks (!) 2 layover tracks (4 berths) What in the everloving @#$% is going on here??? Halved the layover capacity yet again, yet bloviating without end...

Hot...garbage. It assumes an agonizingly slow multi-decade full rollout of clock-facing Regional Rail (2045?!?), which is mostly just an ops change not an equipment change, so the midday storage figures are wildly overinflated. And it excludes the expansion of Readville Yard for the Southside...

Marginal was re-laid in its entirety when the Pike came through in 1964-65 and required widening of the rail ROW. Prior to that the South End street grid abutting the rail canyon was very different, owing to just how many blocks were nuked in the name of urban renewal. There was a street there...

There's no room for a pocket turnback track. The current pocket w/inspection pit is only 1 car (and will probably go away at some point because it can't fit a Type 10), and the area is riddled with support poles. Don't forget, Park used to have 2 loops...the current inner-to-inner track one...

That's probably not going to be possible. The '05 EIS frustratingly doesn't include a total width measurement for stacked Chinatown, but it does offer one for almost identically stacked Boylston: 45'4" from outermost concrete wall pour to outermost concrete wall pour (meaning, subtract at least...

In 2003 a combo station at the mid-block was explicitly considered, as were Alts. with the combo stop and no short-turn loop. All were rejected due to incompatible grades, excessive dwell times, and the fact that it provided zero cost savings over doing 2 stations because of the complexity of...

The police will refuse to do it, and become confrontational with the Mayor. That's pretty much how it went in NYC and several other large cities whose departments have given up the ghost on basic traffic enforcement. The larger the department, the more unaccountable they become to willful...

Green Line has the same general max allowable grade as Silver Line: 6.0% for up to 2500 ft. length. Recommended max grade is 4.0% for unlimited length, which is actually 1% less than it is for Silver. While LRV's have much more tractive effort than an electric bus, steel wheel slip becomes an...

The grades at the portals were absolute crap. 5.6% for the Tremont portal, 6% for Columbus (I'm not even sure why that one is so steep given the straight runup space). They were totally flailing by this point, and that's where the project started slowly coming unglued to its ultimate demise...

...and under the GL tunnel from Boylston Station to Charles St. South. Here's a render of what Chinatown Under station would've looked like: ...and Boylston Under Loop (old render...from when the South End tunnel was going to underpin the abandoned Tremont trolley tunnel): EDIT: BTW, here's...

The PAS grant was for stabilizing the current Class 2 speeds. Pan Am, despite its post-2008 reinvestment in the Patriot Corridor, still left lots of deferred maintenance to patch. PAS has had to play whack-a-mole with constantly popping-up 10 MPH speed restrictions for years. An uprate to...

$46M for 1.5 miles on a ROW with pre-existing bridges used in the last 20 years? Yikes that's a tough swallow. They should seriously consider a VE'd rebid, because that's just not responsible spending for what they're getting.

Garbage in, garbage out. Engineering firms like that need to be carefully managed to produce the desired results, but public agencies have generally lost the ability to provide adequate oversight to contractors. So if you don't provide coherent specs like "Platform needs to provide level...

Yes...instead of using the Fitchburg Line all the way to Greenfield Station and making only only one intermediate stop the whole way in Fitchburg, the Z-shaped route would run out of South Station on the Inland Route to Springfield with stops at Framingham, Worcester, Palmer, and...

That's going to be a tough one to implement. There's a Superfund site halfway down the Franklin Industrial Track, and the chemical contamination has spread to the trackbed. And there's no funding to remediate it yet, with Fed funding now being more unstable than ever. That's why the spur was...

Mini-highs are 1-car only with flippable edges for high-and-wide freights, and then the rest of the platform is low-level for as many cars as you need so at least all doors in the consist can open for step-up boarding/alighting. Same as every DE stop from Haverhill to Old Orchard Beach. This...