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$47M/mi. is way too high. Even Caltrain, the standard-bearer for blowing out electrification budgets to complete absurdity, did it for $12.5M/mi. Basic OCS and supporting electronics (paralleling stations with circuit breakers one every 5-6 miles) runs about $4.5M per mile, and Fairmount is...

Three quarters of a billion dollars for the 7 BEMU sets, at $20M per car. Exactly as awful as the Caltrain BEMU purchase, and it's only a freaking lease. This is apocryphally bad. :(

According to themselves less than a year ago, they're not even that special. That level of compliance bump is more or less typical of fare enforcement best practices. And they got it the very first time they tried it, with just a trial program with a skeleton crew! No, it'll never be...

If there's zero fare enforcement, hardly anyone is going to pay. Try fare enforcement for a change before expensive-ass station enclosures that may not even be possible with the access conditions around a typical D stop and/or just giving up. Read this and other amazing finds in the next issue...

Jesus Christ. NO THEY FUCKING DON'T, YOU BESPOKE-BRAINED CLODS! 🤬

Keolis has the construction contract for it, so they're using in-house track gangs to do it. Every time another maintenance project needs crew members, Franklin DT gets its staff raided to be reassigned elsewhere and so it ends up going idle for weeks/months at a time. And they don't really...

New special-paint unit dropped on rehabbed GP40 #1131 (renumbered to 1776). . . It's designed as an homage to the bicentennial scheme that Boston & Maine RR did in 1976 on a GP38.

Their construction costs are also pretty high relative to other countries in spite of dirt-cheap labor, in part because the blank-check nature of the authoritarian gov't spending doesn't lend itself to good oversight (i.e. "Why bother minding costs when the government is going to print enough...

The averages are probably getting a little bit skewed by the abysmal signal timings on the Longfellow Bridge that cause lots of extended holds during rush hour when the adjacent Park St. signal block is occupied. That's only been a thing since the 1988 installation of ATO signaling on the...

That's going to pile on even more cost, because the door heights and bridge plate interface was the be-all/end-all Caltrain cost bloater. Stadler struggled like hell to get an ADA-compliant bridge plate slope that would even interface with an 8-inch platform, let alone a ground-level platform...

No. Generally speaking, if it's a full-high it's a rote 800 ft. (9 cars) long because that's the default Design Standard adopted by the T in the 1980's and enforced by the Mass Architectural Board. With the 3 Amtrak NEC stops in T territory and some South Station platforms being 1050 ft. (12...

Hey, it only cost exactly as much as Natick Center with half the permanent platforms, no vertical access requirements whatsoever, no track re-spacing, no trail access, and no uninterrupted service during construction! And it still projects more than $10M less than the stalled utterly...

It most likely won't happen in practice. These sets don't have any pass-thru doors in the cabs, so it's not like you could lash them up end-to-end with the battery cars aligned to the extremes and come up with a "normal"-loading 6-car passenger set. Staffing requirements alone for two halves...

The problem is the T backed itself into somewhat of a corner with this convoluted outsource+lease arrangement, such that Stadler was most likely the only manufacturer that could meet all the requirements because of the available Caltrain and Metra BEMU orders for tack-ons. None of the other 4...

Aveila non-revenue moves from the Alstom factory are still banned on the Hudson and New Haven Lines due to the childish two-month old Metro-North dispute, so new set deliveries from the Hornell, NY plant have taken to going the long route via the serpentine Southern Tier corridor through...

The delays in starting the study were directly due to the controversies over NEC FUTURE's HSR bypasses, as the states threatened to spike funding if the Capacity Planning Study had any aims on reviving them. $4M of the $5M total project budget came from joint federal-state funding sources, with...

That render is of a Caltrain-mod (i.e. both high- and low-boarding doors) Stadler bi-level KISS BEMU. That exact make is what they're leasing for Fairmount. The Stadler FLIRT is a single-level car instead of a bi-level, but the floor height is low so its doors can't board at Northeast U.S...

Plus I don't even think Fairmount's and Readville's low platforms are 8 inches above the railhead to begin with like all of Caltrain's stops are, so the onboard bridge plates from the low-level doors probably wouldn't reach down to an acceptable ADA interface to begin with. The mini-high is...

Relocated double-track Readville is a requirement for the "future possibility of 15-minute service" that the slides talk about, because they need to be able to berth 2 trains at once to gain acceptable padding to do sub-20 minute frequencies at the turnback. So these BEMU frequencies, while...

It won't be a Stadler FLIRT; they're low- and middle-high platform only. The only adaptation of it that gets even sorta close (and even then not totally) to 48-inch boarding heights is a British customization that does raised ends and stairs down into the middle seating area...totally...