RIDOT will rebuild that drawbridge if SCR goes to Fall River. The ROW in Tiverton is not abandoned because P&W--at RIDOT's request--never abandoned its freight rights to Newport, even though they haven't been used since 1988 and there's no possibility of any freight returning to Aquidneck Island with the Navy facility being much scaled-back. The line is railbanked, a long-term out-of-service designation which gives P&W at-will reactivation rights if the line is brought up to whatever environmental/safety regs may have changed since '88. Not landbanked, which is when an abandoned line with no extant operator is put in the deep-freeze. Interstate commerce preemption gets a railbanked line woken up worlds easier (not easy, but way easi
er)than a landbanked line, and it doesn't matter if P&W (line operator) and RIDOT (line owner) file for reactivation and the only traffic ends up being passenger with those freight rights as un-exercised as ever. They're the ones with right of first refusal.
Now, that doesn't mean a Purple Line train is going to go blasting past a bunch of beachfront NIMBY's saying "Nyah-nyah! Can't touch me!" It means nobody can thwart the line in its original configuration from being made operable again with the kinds of Operation Chaos freakshows that happened during Greenbush construction or are being fought now with SCR in the Raynham swamp. Doesn't mean upping the permitting from 10 MPH freight traffic to 60 MPH commuter rail traffic isn't going to be an epic cripple fight. It does mean they can get the line declared provisionally active again and locked into final configuration
before the passenger upgrades get final-designed and EIS'd. Takes riff-raff off the table "Grade crossings are the mark of Satan! Buy me a free tunnel!" or "Thou shalt only run magic unicorn electric trains under invisible wires". Still yes to frustrations like soundwalls, fights over pedestrian beachfront access, "Your ground-level rails obstruct my view of Venus", and concern-trolling about it disturbing protected deer tick and mosquito habitats. Tiverton does have the advantage of NOT having any public grade crossings...just 4 or 5 private driveway and boat access ped crossings on a shoreline too rocky for beaches. They might have to haggle with a Riverside Dr. (next to the bridge) residents for an at-grade crossing this time around because the
old overpass there could barely clear the top of a pickup truck, but only having to fight those cripple fights 1-on-1 and limited-liability with landowners instead of over town streets is a shitload easier to do.
So...they could opt to build the new drawbridge, which only crosses 360 ft. abutment-to-abutment (only about 150 ft. longer than Gloucester Draw on the Rockport Line). Then re-lay fresh new track to the Inland Fuel Terminals tank farm straddling the state line where the Fall River tracks end. Line is active (but unused) from Port of Fall River to the Gold Medal Bakery factory on Penn St., out-of-service (but NOT railbanked) the last half-mile to Inland Fuel.
Mt. Hope Ave. about 1600 ft. shy of the state line is the only public grade crossing in city of Fall River (paved over, but that's legal on an OOS line with the RR's permission and IOU from the city to pay for crossing repairs if Inland Fuel requests freight service again). Then run the dinner train as a 25 MPH seasonal and weekend shuttle to the commuter rail station at Fall River Depot for a couple of years until the trains have been de-stigmatized enough to push through the big-money upgrades to signalize and push the speeds to commuter-grade. Wouldn't be much different from how the Cape Flyer came to be on slow-ass track, except that the new rail in Tiverton and over the bridge would be mint condition and supporting of higher speeds when the rest of the line got replaced and the cripple fights over higher-speed safety fencing and cable trenching got settled.
They're not gonna do this until there is
some sort of passenger connection to link to in MA. Even Newport-Taunton would be excruciating as a private shuttle trip on all that horrid existing track. But the hurdle for reactivation and reconnection to the mainland is quite low, and can be front-loaded and set up barebones at reasonable expense with a commuter-quality Phase II being pushed through later once the tears of impotent rage in Tiverton have quieted. RIDOT's and P&W's little quid pro quo wink-wink railbanking trickery there is the foresight that makes it all possible. So I think they'll pounce at fast-tracking the reconnection--if little more--when SCR is not only a lock but has a reliable opening date pegged. Fits their transit MO for staggered build-outs...small state, can't fund a monolithic project in one sitting, more disciplined at spending wisely when it appropriates small task-specific projects in an ongoing series instead of going too big too soon, relies heavily on neighbors to supply traffic and connections. Can't see why they'd break stride from what's been working and working well on their other rail projects, so staggered-and-steady chunks meeting MA's handiwork at the border seems like the best way to treat Newport too.
The fodder offered up in the RI 2014 State Rail Plan seems to jibe with that view. They want to fund some on-island track improvements to make the dinner train more useful general-purpose transit, study the bridge and Tiverton when SCR gives them a reason to, then springboard from there in a direction towards commuter-quality speeds. But
not jump the gun and say commuter rail is going to lead all other investments by the nose when they can't predict what awaits in Fall River or how much Massachusetts is willing to impale itself with defective-by-design service to get to Fall River.
