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Thank you for this detailed response! I'm curious, what do you make of the argument that the extra layover space would not be needed if the MBTA moved to a frequent regional rail model where trains didn't park during the mid-day, but continued operating at least 30 min frequencies? Or if NSRL...

That all sounds reasonable about the additional capacity gains out of Widett, but one question I do have is optimizing alignments to avoid Tower 1 crossing movements. According to the environmental assessment for SSX, crossing moves at the Tower and at the two downstream interlockings on...

Everett and Chelsea are also great examples. They are rapid transit communities but boast no service as good as the Mattapan trolley. The law is very clear that a "rapid transit community" is not just a town with a rapid transit stop according the FTA definition of heavy rail. It is about fixed...

I was going to say that a comparison of East-West and SCR is not really warranted in that there is no way to handicap East-West by sending it on a roundabout route like SCR Phase I. There is one route to Springfield: the MBTA Worcester Line to its namesake city and then CSX's Boston Subdivision...

Harvard Square is my home station and I use the Red Line regularly, but I would welcome a full closure north of Kendall for a while if it actually fixed the slow zones. At this point, the crawl from Central to Harvard has gotten so slow that I have genuinely chosen to walk because it is faster...

To be clear, I absolutely was not proposing there would be any grade crossings on a surface-level Blue Line. I was envisioning up-and-over ped crossings like Storrow has right now (ideally, much wider and with ADA compliant ramps). However, for all the park access reasons described by other...

I love the idea of taking this one step further and having BLX emerge to the surface from a portal in the current Storrow ROW just a bit north of the band shell. It would run at-grade but in a reserved ROW along the current path of Storrow before dipping underground again just before Mass Ave...

The reason this is a bigger problem at Dulles than National is that WMATA times the final train each evening so that trains pass through either Metro Center or L'Enfant Plaza (depending on the line) at roughly closing time. As the system has expanded farther into the suburbs this has led to some...

Somewhere on this forum, I read a post that you wrote about potentially extending the Green Line all the way to Waltham and taking over the Fitchburg ROW through the town center and around Brandeis, with the Fitchburg Line itself taking over the Mass Central ROW to bypass Waltham. I really liked...

The "excuse" is that adding length to high-level platforms is not at all the main driver of cost - UNLESS there is something in the way. Like, perhaps Waverley you would avoid it because as soon as you have to move the retaining wall, it's an order of magnitude more costly. But aside from those...

Question - Have any efforts been made to plan for an extension of South Coast Rail from Fall River to Newport, RI and safeguard the ROW that such an extension would require? I was able to find an article explaining why the project would be a good idea, but the only official plan it cited was...

STB has voted to establish reciprocal switching. Not sure about immediate implications for freight in New England, but certainly seems like a big change in how the industry operates.

Quite sad. Do we know what might become of the line? Between the militancy we are seeing with the bike path group in Falmouth and the decision Danvers already made to turn their section into a trail, it will be really important to keep tracks in the ground if we want to preserve any chance of...

Understood about P'town. I thought maybe at least Orleans could work but an armchair overview of the density makes the demand seem doubtful. What about the Chatham Branch though? Looking at the Google Map shared above, the old ROW looks much straighter than the Main out to P'town or even just...

Great points from two of the higher-rated comments on that article: And:

It's good to see CT investing in new equipment, but it's also a bit of a missed opportunity. After Fairmount here in Boston and possibly the Empire route from NYC to Albany, I'd say the Hartford Line is the best candidate in the nation for stringing up the wires and running some EMUs. Unlike the...

Distressing news: there is now a funded effort to abandon the freight line in Falmouth in favor of a rail-trail: YouTuber South Coast Rail Videos has a good summary here about how this abandonment would increase truck trips to and from the Cape and squander a grant that the railroad's customer...

Perhaps deserve was the wrong word to use. What I mean is that if a place has been pushing for transit for ages and the state and feds get together the capital for a major project, it feeds a narrative of distrust and permanent disinvestment in a place to pass it over yet again in favor of...

Do you have a sense of which cities and towns: 1. Have always wanted rail transit, but never gotten it, or never gotten it of the scale and mode they deserve, 2. Used to be NIMBY about transit, but have changed and are more open now, 3. Were and still are mostly NIMBY? I get the sense that...

Like Riverside, I'm sympathetic. But if it is important to count the externality of disruption during construction, you also need to count the externality of station access time. As New Yorkers are quickly seeing with East Side Access, deep bore stations are genuinely far less convenient to...