Cape Cod Rail, Bridges and Highways

[Charlie_mta]

Every rail trail is a policy failure.

I agree in a lot of cases. Converting an abandoned rail line to a trail locks it up forever, because once it becomes a trail, there is insurmountable public opposition to later converting it back to rail or BRT.

 

[jbray]

There might be enough space abutting the trail for a single track rail-with-trail (at least as far as Harwich, and possibly all the way to Wellfleet). However, I wouldn't be surprised if locals are opposed to rail reactivation alongside the trail.

Though I know it's incredibly impractical to the point of unfeasible, I often wonder if the US should bring back narrow gauge for rail trail politics. If we can double track meter or 3ft gauge and still have trail width, is that worth it in the short term to over come the politics of losing the public space back to its original land use?

 

[Aprehensive_Words]

Auckland, NZ (pop. 1.7M) runs their entire regional rail service (largely 3 trains/hour) on narrow-gauge EMUs due to a quirk of history and is currently carrying 45,000 to 50,000 passengers daily on a weekday (and a pre-pandemic high of around 2.1M monthly trips) across their two-and-a-half lines.

For comparison, that's about what the Blue Line or the Green Line was carrying pre-pandemic with much greater frequencies. So, not nothing.

 

[ritchiew]

I'm all for expanding the rail network. If we funded public transit like we fund car infrastructure, that would be simple. There's other lower hanging fruit. We could double CCRTA's budget without batting an eye. Put dedicated bus lanes on the bridges and the Grand Army Highway. Send more trains over the dismally underutilized rail bridge.

Why exactly does it take an hour for the Cape Flyer to go from Bourne to Hyannis? Bad track? All the grade crossings? Speeding that up would be good for the Flyer, but also make it feasible for year round rail service getting people on and off the cape.

 

[jklo]

You have to remember that the Cape is only remotely busy 3 months out of the year and the density is low as it is. Most stores close or have limited hours past Labor Day.

Traffic even in the summer isn't that bad other than getting on/off the Cape at times. Which (yes) a wider Sagamore would help. You do need a car though.

 

[stick n move]

That is an awesome map, bro. I was in the central part of West Virginia last week, and that is a great map of the historic rail network there.

I was hoping somebody would find it useful. A lot of people know about openrailwaymap (Link), but I think its kind of crappy because of how twitchy it is and how the lines dont appear at every zoom interval. So I went looking for better options and found that one called greater new jersey railroad map that shows essentially the entire east coast (Link) and this one (Link) that shows the entire world. Pretty awesome tools to have.

 

[bigeman312]

You have to remember that the Cape is only remotely busy 3 months out of the year and the density is low as it is. Most stores close or have limited hours past Labor Day.

Traffic even in the summer isn't that bad other than getting on/off the Cape at times. Which (yes) a wider Sagamore would help. You do need a car though.

Regardless of the "need a car" when you get there argument, intercity train travel is still quite valuable for park and ride or kiss and ride. There are many instances of people I know who have driven two seperate SOV to the Cape due to different schedules and one of them would have taken the train and met one another on the Cape if they knew the service existed or if the service was better. Intercity train travel can be useful even if its terminus in an arguably auto-centric location.

Fast, frequent, consistent, and regular service between Hyannis and South Station is an important step in priming ridership for these types of trips.

The first two steps to doing so is to make service more consistent and to improve the speed of the trip, which is abysmal past Middleborough/Lakeville. With no changes between South Station and Middleborough/Lakeville, just while upgrading the Middleborough/Lakeville to Hyannis stretch alone, we would have:

Average Speed Middleborough/Lakeville -> Hyannis (including stops)	Travel Time (Middleborough/Lakeville -> Hyannis)	Travel Time (South Station -> Hyannis)
Current: 26.1 mph	1:40	2:38
30 mph	1:27	2:25
40 mph	1:05	2:03
50 mph	0:52	1:50
60 mph	0:44	1:42

Currently, it's already competitive with driving from South Station at the PM peak three days per week in the summer, without factoring in time to/from station. Even without track upgrades, getting a more robust summer schedule with one round trip per weekday (outbound AM and inbound PM) and two round-trips per weekend day (one AM and one PM) would do wonders to build ridership. You could still halt service in the off-season to facilitate track work.

Then, at a 30 mph average over that stretch of track, it's competitive with driving from South Station to Hyannis for Tuesday - Friday afternoon departures and Saturday midday departures. It's even competitive from Middleborough/Lakeville as a park'n'ride on summer Fridays and Saturdays.

At a 40 mph average over that stretch, it's competitive with driving from South Station to Hyannis every weekday afternoon departing between 1:30 and 4:30, and as late as 6:00 some days, as well as Saturday midday. It's now very viable as a park/n/ride from Middleborough/Lakeville. To the point where I could see demand exploding if frequency were increased. That is a good reassess point and consider yearround service, but we should be aiming to get there: daily service in the summer (two round trips on weekends), with a 40mph average speed between Middleborough/Lakeville and Hyannis.

 

[jklo]

There's already reasonably frequent bus service connecting the Cape to Boston. Starts in Hyannis and has stops in Boston at South Station then heads on to Logan.

There's even some crazies who use it for commuting purposes apparently. There's a stop at the shopping plaza right before the Sagamore.

 

[ceo]

Reactivating rail to Provincetown makes absolutely no sense. It's still going to take several hours to get there from Boston, while the fast ferry can do it in an hour and a half. And there will be basically zero demand for nine months of the year.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Reactivating rail to Provincetown makes absolutely no sense. It's still going to take several hours to get there from Boston, while the fast ferry can do it in an hour and a half. And there will be basically zero demand for nine months of the year.

Basically true for most of the Outer Cape. And good bike infrastructure there reduces the need for cars when on Cape. Fast Ferry + Bikes >>> Rail for the Outer Cape

 

[bigeman312]

Agreed. Investing in improving rail to Hyannis, ferry to Provincetown, and bus/bike infrastructure in between should be the focuses.

 

[ulrichomega]

Reactivating rail to Provincetown makes absolutely no sense. It's still going to take several hours to get there from Boston, while the fast ferry can do it in an hour and a half. And there will be basically zero demand for nine months of the year.

Not that I disagree with a bike path being more important, but surely the benefit here would be better connectivity to the rest of the cape, not with Boston. A half-hourly trolley or something like that that gives a quick connection to the middle and upper capes, or even the ferries. Of course the ferry is going to be the better way to get to Boston, that's just a geographic fact. But if someone could take the ferry to Ptown and then hop on a trolley to their hotel in Orleans, that would surely take some traffic off the roads.

Now, the major issue with that is that a bus on existing roads is probably almost as good at half the cost. Increasing CCRTA funding would do more than re-purposing a bike trail.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Looking at the railway map the cape used to have a rail line that went all the way to p town as well as spurs to basically every important town.

Rail map

Is there any momentum towards at least opening the line back up all the way to p town? I dont remember hearing anything recently. I think that would be pretty important towards upping ridership. If they could eventually get a shuttle that goes back and forth from bourne to p town as well that would help a lot with inter-cape transit. Then they could start to fill in with tod and you could start really having something that works.

The line isn't landbanked to P'town. North of North Eastham was abandoned in 1960, and other than a segment through Wellfleet preserved for a power line ROW the property lines were all reverted to abutters. See on Google Maps map view. As soon as the line hits Route 6 in Downtown Wellfleet the property lines are all a mishmash. They can't even get the trail contiguous to Provincetown it's so obliterated by encroachment. It's never going to be physically possible to run rail to P'town again. And probably won't ever be possible to bike there either.

Plus the schedules suuuucked that far out because the line was hardly straight. Passenger service east of Yarmouth didn't survive the Depression because the ferries were so much faster, and the New Haven RR made better time running connecting buses out of Hyannis under its own roof because the roads were so much better. The same is true today. What the Cape needs for transit is robust train service to Hyannis (and possibly Falmouth), and robust CCRTA bus presence everywhere else.

 

[HenryAlan]

Reactivating rail to Provincetown makes absolutely no sense. It's still going to take several hours to get there from Boston, while the fast ferry can do it in an hour and a half. And there will be basically zero demand for nine months of the year.

I agree that it makes no sense as transportation between Boston and Provincetown. But does it make sense for transportation between Hyannis and Provincetown? That's the more important question in my mind. Rail is not just a connection between two end points, but a series of connected trips among multiple points along the way. Personally, I think a light rail line might be more useful, combined with the Provincetown Ferry and an expanded schedule Cape Flyer.

 

[DAVE]

train chunnel from Boston to ptown when?

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Why exactly does it take an hour for the Cape Flyer to go from Bourne to Hyannis? Bad track? All the grade crossings? Speeding that up would be good for the Flyer, but also make it feasible for year round rail service getting people on and off the cape.

The track is curvy, and not at tippy-top maintenance condition (though worlds better than it was a decade ago). It's also unsignaled, which caps the max authorized speed at 59 MPH. NYNH&H in 1955 used to do Buzzards Bay-Hyannis in 51 minutes, making stops at BB, Sandwich, West Barnstable, Yarmouth, and Hyannis. In 1930 they did it in 50 minutes with one more extra stop at Sagamore. Obviously given the faster time and denser stop selection, there's quite a lot of improvement still to be had by doing track replacement to get it up to the top speed within the curves.

 

[bigeman312]

The track is curvy, and not at tippy-top maintenance condition (though worlds better than it was a decade ago). It's also unsignaled, which caps the max authorized speed at 59 MPH. NYNH&H in 1955 used to do Buzzards Bay-Hyannis in 51 minutes, making stops at BB, Sandwich, West Barnstable, Yarmouth, and Hyannis. In 1930 they did it in 50 minutes with one more extra stop at Sagamore. Obviously given the faster time and denser stop selection, there's quite a lot of improvement still to be had by doing track replacement to get it up to the top speed within the curves.

How feasibly would it be to get the average speed Middleborough/Lakeville -> Hyannis (including stops) to 40 mph? That would shave 35 minutes off the trip.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

How feasibly would it be to get the average speed Middleborough/Lakeville -> Hyannis (including stops) to 40 mph? That would shave 35 minutes off the trip.

Flyer speeds have been creeping up every year since launch because the state has put a steady stream of annual improvements into the line. M'boro-Buzzards Bay is pretty close to top track speed now, and all grade crossings on the route have been renewed so there are no longer any crossing-related restrictions. The problem is that on-Cape it's still curvy enough that it's hard to get much faster than NYNH&H did back in the day. Other than a 4-mile near-straightaway in West Barnstable and a 2-mile straightway on the Hyannis Branch south of Route 6 to the Hyannis Station approach it's almost constantly weaving and wobbling with non-sharp curves. You probably still aren't averaging 40 on the Cape side of the bridge in any universe. Middleboro-BB has some speedup potential if you signalized it and uprated the track to Class 4/79 MPH max, but that's only going to happen if there's a substantial Commuter Rail schedule heading south of Middleboro...something South Coast Rail Phase I unduly fucks with. The 2007 Buzzards Bay CR extension study estimated a Boston-BB local with an intermediate stop at Wareham taking 74 minutes with all-Class 4 track. Project that upward from a Cape Flyer express pattern. Signalization and Class 4 track on the Cape probably wouldn't increase speeds any over Class 3/unsignalized because of the curves. Again...you're probably doing no better than NYNH&H minus the excess on-Cape intermediate stops.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

But if someone could take the ferry to Ptown and then hop on a trolley to their hotel in Orleans, that would surely take some traffic off the roads.

Rail is not just a connection between two end points, but a series of connected trips among multiple points along the way. Personally, I think a light rail line might be more useful, combined with the Provincetown Ferry and an expanded schedule Cape Flyer.

I'll pour some cold water on this by referencing the 1930 NYNH&H Provincetown schedule. It took 1:53 to get between Yarmouth Jct. where the Hyannis trains split off to the P'town docks. Now...the train did make a pretty absurd number of intermediate stops on 45 miles along the way: Bass River, South Dennis, North Harwich, Harwich, Pleasant Lake, Brewster, East Brewster, Orleans, Eastham, North Eastham, South Wellfleet, Wellfleet, South Truro, Truro, North Truro. But if you're trying to connect trips along multiple points along the way, you're going to need to have a very healthy number of intermediates so expressing is not really going to be in the cards. That quick "hop" between the P'town docks and downtown Orleans that @ulrichomega cites, for instance, took 1:03 over just 26 miles. The rail line was very curvy and had a low top speed, and other than P'town there were no really big ridership anchors so there was little choice but to make stops at every village center to scoop up what little was there. A trolley is going to face the same hurdles of painfully long schedules required to connect the dots. And given the geometry you have to work with on the ROW, I can't possibly see how that beats a bus on the straighter roads at any sort of traffic loading.

It was bad passenger rail back in its day. That's why it got bustituted way back in the Depression, long before most people even owned cars.

 

[michaelw37]

Plus the schedules suuuucked that far out because the line was hardly straight. Passenger service east of Yarmouth didn't survive the Depression because the ferries were so much faster, and the New Haven RR made better time running connecting buses out of Hyannis under its own roof because the roads were so much better. The same is true today. What the Cape needs for transit is robust train service to Hyannis (and possibly Falmouth), and robust CCRTA bus presence everywhere else.

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 Orleans. Density along the southern shore seems higher, and you're much farther from the P'town-Boston ferry connection even than Orleans is. Farther from US-6 too with its grade-separated speeds. Downtown Chatham would be a heavy lift because I don't see an easy way around the airport smack in the middle of the ROW, but a terminus at the airport itself might work as the transit hub for the "elbow" of the Cape, with stops at South Chatham, Harwich Center, and Route 134 on the way back to Yarmouth Junction. Sure, it's not high on the priority list - This would have to be a universe with SCR Phase II well up and running and normal MBTA regional trains running to Hyannis. It's probably even below reactiviation to Falmouth and Woods Hole. But could it be at least possible in a way that the totally DOA P'town reactivation is not?