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Not NEC/New England related, maybe should be in this thread for other Amtrak topics?

Whoops. My mistake. That's what I get for blindly trusting OpenRailwayMap. (Looks like there was a connection that was removed at some point, based on the Google Earth view.) I'm curious as to whether the freight volumes are sufficient to interfere with passenger traffic enough to warrant such...

ER is shorthand for the Eastern Route (the ex-Boston & Maine line that's now the Newburyport/Rockport Line, which used to extend up to Maine). There have been various proposals on here to rebuild the northern part of the Eastern Route to host the Downeaster service, to help speed up the trip to...

I mean, yes, being an arm of the Chinese state means CRRC is inevitably in the service of the CCP's political priorities, whatever they may be. That said, main-CRRC has operations in a lot of places that aren't the US or China, and it would be an oddly self-harming mechanism of "punishing the...

I find it somewhat hard to believe that a company would do that willingly. They still have sizeable outstanding US orders (including the MBTA's and the CTA's), with, one would expect, significant financial penalties if the cars are late, defective, or simply not built at all, not to mention the...

Yup, just like the previous fiasco with Breda. Oh, wait, they're Italian. Or Boeing. No, hang on, they're American. It's a good question, albeit one we're not likely to ever fully get an answer to, what things went wrong to make this procurement go so disastrously off the rails (pun fully...

Mhmm, because there's another manufacturer with a surplus of cars just waiting to go that somehow miraculously fit our idiosyncratic tunnel dimensions? It's absolutely understandable to be irate about CRRC's failures and their impacts on the T's ability to provide reliable and sufficient (and...

There's definitely good reasons to have some unification of the various state-run passenger rail operations, and I don't think that it'd necessarily be practical or advisable for the MBTA service district to progressively assimilate all the new territory that would be added, say, by East-West...

Absolutely agree. The ferries do feel like an afterthought, which to me is all the more reason not to hive them off into something separate, because how would that not make them less of an afterthought unless Beacon Hill is planning a massive expansion of water transportation? (Aren't the...

Given the lengths that were gone to to get the highway torn down, I'd imagine there'd be a storm of outrage at the prospect of even a much-lower-impact elevated anything going in there. Kind of a shame, to be honest, it'd be a decently place for something like Disney's monorails (which are...

I'm not a lawyer (I usually add that disclaimer, but clearly forgot last post, my bad) so I don't know specifically. That said, you can't just sue because you feel like it (well, at least, not if you want to win). The contract will have terms and conditions of what CRRC is obliged to deliver...

MTOW's a reasonable if imperfect proxy, because aircraft are frequently not operated at MTOW (operating empty weight, OEW, is closer to fixed, with the weight of a loaded aircraft somewhere between OEW and MTOW at takeoff, and decreasing thereafter as fuel is burned). That said, you're right...

I'd imagine that, subject to any relevant contractual provisions, the most they'd be able to do is to extract penalties for late, shoddy work, not to mention make CRRC fix them on their dime such that they work to specification (i.e., fix any of the results of shoddy work under warranty). Lousy...

For the most part, I think not. One of the (weaker) arguments against the millionaires tax ballot initiative last fall was that the funds it would raise that were ostensibly earmarked for education and transportation could be put to other purposes by the General Court. There may be some state...

Agreed, though I think there is some added value in being able to point to the smaller-ticket improvements, both in demonstrating their value and that they're capable of being implemented. Things from smaller to larger, like Boston's expansion of bus lanes, Cambridge's expansion of bike lanes...

I mean...that doesn't solve many if any of the problems I mentioned. I don't see how it's functionally possible to only charge MA drivers, who are the only people the state has income tax info on (theoretically, because there's plenty of people who can drive who don't necessarily have to file...

Huh. Either the thought of a possible Washington Street connection was there at some level that early, or the project was even more monumentally stupid than I thought. There is no universe in which tunneling down Essex is unambiguously a good idea given how narrow it is, even if we assume for...

Wasn't there a thread around here somewhere documenting the literal years it took for them to replace the maps at Park Street prominently showing Government Center as closed for renovation long after it had reopened? They have a habit of doing stuff like this. It is a good question - albeit...

F-Line has a thorough accounting of its demise...somewhere around here. (I'm not in the mood to engage with the search function at the moment, but I'll link to it if I come across it.) As I recall from that, Phase III died because of the cost considerations. The tunneling under Essex (as BRT...

Okay, let's re-phrase my critique. You're correct that a collective belief that the toll money would actually be used to make transportation systems better is a necessary condition of and for implementing a scheme like this. What it isn't (and why that's not really a rebuttal as such) is a...