F-Line to Dudley
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New Hampshire is a magical place.
Commuter Rail to New Hampshire?
- Thread starter found5dollar
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BostonUrbEx
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That's it. Put up a toll on every single road out of NH.
Ron Newman
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If New Hampshire doesn't want Massachusetts trash, I wonder why they extended one of our bike paths (Nashua River Rail Trail) three miles into their state.
Doesn't the off ramp from route 3 to the mall in Nashua actually 'start' in Massachusetts?
I just love it when people shout things out at public meetings with their "common sense" opinions.
Yes, it does.
I lived in NH for about 6 months for work. I'm amazed that state is given such priority in politics.
found5dollar
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ive lived her for 3 years for work and am doing all i can to get out.
whighlander
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Found -- A lot of my friends who've lived in NH since the 1980's and consider themselves to be true New Hampshire-men now believe that most everything south of Concord is contaminated from creeping Ex-urban Boston -- people who move to NH to escape crushing state and local taxes and then start advocating for services which lead to increased local taxes.
One of the real sore-points which separates the "true New Hampshiremen" from the business boosters and promoters is the recent name of the "Manchester-Boston Regional Airport"
In-fact -- most of my friends and technical colleagues who consider themselves to be "true New Hampshiremen" have on some occasions expressed how happy they are to have visitors from the south (leaving their money behind in exchange for maple syrup, skiing or booze) -- but they would prefer "for all the "Carpet bagging Massholes who permanently moved to NH to leave and take their politics with them!"
found5dollar
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hahahahai have witnessed the exact same thing. I never changed my car plates from MA to NH (shhhh dont tell the government) because technically i am a seasonal worker. I have gotten yelled at at gas stations and the like and told to "go Home" multiple times. Sadly the good theater jobs in New England are currently in New Hampshire because of all the small summerstock companies. Can't wait for grad school next September.
The funny thing is, in almost any other part of the US, New England would be one state, not six.
BostonUrbEx
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Massachusetts trash seems to be doing well in the GOP primaries in the anti-massachusetts state. lolz
Pierce
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He had the benefit of it being his home state, and sharing a border with his home state. Then again, it's 1000 miles from his home state, and on the opposite side of the country from his home state and his home state.
whighlander
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Bill -- actually had history been a bit different -- most of the people in the country (and some of Canada) would be today living in Massachusetts which originally had a claim on everything west to the Pacific and some angle to the north as well -- wherever that was
Thankfully, the people who came here for religious freedom -- first wanted land so they moved out and founded a whole lot of towns in the first 50 years and then they decided that they wanted strict adherence to their Salem, Plymouth and Boston-based Theocracy and so dissenters fled to found the rest of New England and only Maine remained as a colony of Boston -- until the mid 19th Century
But in the 21st Century a lot of New England has been reassembled in that Boston really dominates most of RI, Southern New Hampshire, and nearest corners of ME and CT and influences the rest of New England through institution including:
New England Governors Council (and an extension which includes the Premiers of the Canadian Maritime Provinces)
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
US 1st Circuit Appeals Court
1st Coast Guard District
Boston Red Sox
New England Patriots
Logan International Airport
Heritage New England
New England Historic Genealogical Society
Discovernewengland.org -- THE OFFICIAL TOURISM SITE FOR THE NEW ENGLAND STATES
New England Aquarium
etc -- Google New England and see what comes-up and you will find that most of it will be located in Boston or the immediate suburbs
^^ Exactly; New England is more of a single entity than many states are. And it's really thought of that way by people who live in other parts of the country because of the accent, sports teams (like you mentioned) and historical architecture.
In regards to the article posted at the bottom of the last page, it sounds like a a lot of the "concerned citizens" would fit in at any town's meeting concerning public transit. I'm not familiar with the details of extending commuter rail to NH, but it sounds like a lot of people (or maybe a vocal minority) are most concerned about layover facilities being built. I can understand being concerned it you live next door to where this is being proposed, but people make it sound like a commuter rail stop and layover facility are going to destroy their entire pristine town. If I'm looking at the correct railroad tracks on Google Maps, it looks like there is plenty of room next to their WalMart/Home Depot/ Kohl's/Staples complex for a layover facility.
F-Line to Dudley
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The layover area is a former Superfund site. The yard construction is going to improve it to far better condition than the decontaminated-to-minimum-spec abandoned industrial site it currently is.
Concerned citizens are often concerned to be concerned, not to know why they're concerned.
Could be worse. At least there are actual permits to settle here. The local reigning champions of concerned citizens being concerned to be concerned is Upton over the Grafton & Upton RR's reactivation of its out-of-service track...which every state and federal authority has reaffirmed to death that they have full unimpeded right to do without permission from the town. And still. . .
http://protectupton.blog.com/
(↑ This has been about a month's worth of punchlines on the RR.net G&U thread.)
whighlander
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Bill -- Indeed see the Book
" The Nine Nations of North America"
1981 by Joel Garreau
taken from Wikipedia:
In the Nine Nations of North America
"...Garreau suggests that North America can be divided into nine regions, or "nations", which have distinctive economic and cultural features. He also argues that conventional national and state borders are largely artificial and irrelevant, and that his "nations" provide a more accurate way of understanding the true nature of North American society.
The Nine Nations:
1) New England — an expanded version including not only Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut (although omitting the Connecticut suburbs of New York City), but also the Canadian Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Capital: Boston.
2) The Foundry — the by-then-declining industrial areas of the northeastern United States and Great Lakes region stretching from New York City to Milwaukee, and including Chicago, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Toledo, Philadelphia, and Southern Ontario centering on Toronto. Capital: Detroit.
3) Dixie — the former Confederate States of America (today the southeastern United States) centered on Atlanta, and including most of eastern Texas. Garreau's "Dixie" also includes Kentucky (which had both a Union and a nominal Confederate government); southern and southeastern portions of Missouri, southern Illinois, and southern Indiana; and the "Little Dixie" region of southeastern Oklahoma. Finally, the region also includes most of Florida, as far south as the cities of Fort Myers and Naples. Capital: Atlanta.
4) The Breadbasket — most of the Great Plains states and part of the Prairie provinces: Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, the Dakotas, almost all of Oklahoma, parts of Missouri, western Wisconsin, eastern Colorado, the eastern edge of New Mexico, parts of Illinois and Indiana, and North Texas. Also included are some of Northern Ontario and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Capital: Kansas City.
5) The Islands — The South Florida metropolitan area, the Everglades and Florida Keys, and the Caribbean. Capital: Miami.
6) Mexamerica — the southern and Central Valley portions of California as well as southern Arizona, the portion of Texas bordering on the Rio Grande, most of New Mexico, northern Mexico, and the Baja California peninsula. Capital: Los Angeles.
7) Ecotopia — the Pacific Northwest coast west of the Cascade Range and the Coast Mountains, as well as several Alaskan Pacific Coast Ranges, stretching from Alaska down through coastal British Columbia, Washington state, Oregon and into California just north of Santa Barbara. Capital: San Francisco.
8) The Empty Quarter — most of Alaska, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and Colorado from Denver west, as well as the eastern portions of Oregon, California, Washington, all of Alberta and Northern Canada (including what is now Nunavut), northern Arizona, parts of New Mexico (mainly the area controlled by the Navajo Nation), and British Columbia east of the Coast Ranges. Capital: Denver.
9) Quebec — the primarily French-speaking province of Canada, which held referenda on secession in 1980 and 1995, the latter of which the "separatists" lost narrowly. Capital: Quebec City......"
Note that only Quebec, Dixie and New England are in widespread use today and only Quebec City and Boston consider themselves to be Capitals of Regions
FrankLloydMike
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Re: New salem mbta CR station
Not to completely change subject, but my guess is that an eventual commuter rail to Portsmouth would be an extension of the Haverhill line, which is already planned to be extended to Plaistow. The line between the state line and Newmarket is already used by Amtrak, there is already a heavily used station in Exeter, and the route is already designated as the main line in the area. I believe an extension of the Haverhill line would also be more direct between Portsmouth and Boston than the Newburyport line. I've drawn up a quick map of the Capitol Corridor, which is already under study (and has the support the of 75% of people in New Hampshire), and two possibly routes that future commuter rail could take to Portsmouth.
Interestingly, the Union Leader (which, along with the current legislative leadership in Concord, is much more regressive than New Hampshire as a whole) has an article today about a meeting last night in which Portsmouth residents came out in support of commuter rail:
Here's the presentation from that meeting.
Not to completely change subject, but my guess is that an eventual commuter rail to Portsmouth would be an extension of the Haverhill line, which is already planned to be extended to Plaistow. The line between the state line and Newmarket is already used by Amtrak, there is already a heavily used station in Exeter, and the route is already designated as the main line in the area. I believe an extension of the Haverhill line would also be more direct between Portsmouth and Boston than the Newburyport line. I've drawn up a quick map of the Capitol Corridor, which is already under study (and has the support the of 75% of people in New Hampshire), and two possibly routes that future commuter rail could take to Portsmouth.
Interestingly, the Union Leader (which, along with the current legislative leadership in Concord, is much more regressive than New Hampshire as a whole) has an article today about a meeting last night in which Portsmouth residents came out in support of commuter rail:
Here's the presentation from that meeting.
whighlander
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Re: New salem mbta CR station
Frank -- thumbed through the pdf -- that presentation has some very interesting maps and tables -- many are relevant to a lot of the threads under the Transit and Infrastructure
Frank -- thumbed through the pdf -- that presentation has some very interesting maps and tables -- many are relevant to a lot of the threads under the Transit and Infrastructure
F-Line to Dudley
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Re: New salem mbta CR station
NH Seacoast is an oddity in that state in that it's been fairly consistently pro-rail while the rest of the state has deadlocked itself in an ideological cripple fight (i.e. "I support X position because it humiliates my arch-nemesis", "car vs. rail...one must defeat the other!" rather than rational pros/cons advocacy). It's the most self-defeating possible way to approach it. It's refreshing that Seacoast is avoiding that trap and talking about it in a healthy way, but doesn't put them in a great spot to do anything about it unless they petition to secede and join Maine or Massachusetts because the rest of the state has to get on the same page and set its priorities. I don't think you can make a great demographic case for putting any corridor ahead of Nashua-Manchester-Concord for in-state CR. Which is unfair to Portsmouth, which wants it and would utilize it well, but unfortunately that's NH's quandry. It's self-defeating for their meager resources to build out their transit out-of-sequence when the Capitol Corridor is such a fat target unparalleled by any other.
As for whether it's better to shoehorn the Portsmouth Branch via the Western Route Mainline to fit them in than the Eastern Route...maybe as a temporary solution combined with some freight upgrades to the Naval Shipyard, where Pan Am has strategic customers and desire to sign on more business. Like...60 MPH/Class 3 track tops that's going to do the max a freight carrier would ever want but not waste too much additional upgrade frills on pure passenger needs. That can patch them along, but problems are lack of population density on that Plaistow-Exeter-Newmarket-Portsmouth corridor, and severe freight congestion on the mainline to Lawrence that's going to keep service levels poorer than it needs to be for a city like that. Much more problematic than the MA portion of the Haverhill Line to Plaistow, which is only traveling through 8 miles of the worst of the freight congestion at the very end of the line on track owned and dispatched by the MBTA, not Pan Am.
But the T isn't going to be interested in doing out-of-state mercenary service over that. The Western Route brings little additional traffic relief to MA through the sparser Plaistow-Newfields stretch, the freight congestion is very heavy and dispatched past Plaistow by Pan Am, and the headways wouldn't be achievably dense to draw the kind of tix revenue that would intrigue them. They only want Plaistow for the more spacious layover space, which allows increases to the Haverhill schedule they can't get by staying at Bradford. The station's a cheap throw-in to draw revenue out of their preferred yard siting instead of deadheading trains for storage out of Haverhill. They would be interested in the Eastern Route straight up to Portsmouth because the I-95 diversions have significant impacts on MA in Seabrook all the way up. Same reason they're happy as clams to be operator to Concord along Route 3 or anywhere in Rhode Island along 95. But there's no parallel highways on the Western Route. They want ticket profits out out of these out-of-state deals, not simply to have costs subsidized for them at no net-gain.
Basically, a spur to Portsmouth would have to be pitched as a "well, we were gonna need to do this soley for freight regardless, so let's move it up the queue and milk it for some extra." Use that for route-priming for 8 years while they initiate formal planning to bring the Eastern Route back up there for a bona fide high-density commuter trip. But the planning for the Branch upgrade stopgap and the real-deal Eastern Route extension would have to go hand-in-hand. And the daunting task for getting anything going hand-in-hand is that NH is first going to have to get out of this dysfunctional rail vs. car, one-mode-must-defeat-the-other mindset before it can sanely plan anything. They don't even fund the in-state Downeaster stops as-is they're so incapable of agreeing amongst themselves.
NH Seacoast is an oddity in that state in that it's been fairly consistently pro-rail while the rest of the state has deadlocked itself in an ideological cripple fight (i.e. "I support X position because it humiliates my arch-nemesis", "car vs. rail...one must defeat the other!" rather than rational pros/cons advocacy). It's the most self-defeating possible way to approach it. It's refreshing that Seacoast is avoiding that trap and talking about it in a healthy way, but doesn't put them in a great spot to do anything about it unless they petition to secede and join Maine or Massachusetts because the rest of the state has to get on the same page and set its priorities. I don't think you can make a great demographic case for putting any corridor ahead of Nashua-Manchester-Concord for in-state CR. Which is unfair to Portsmouth, which wants it and would utilize it well, but unfortunately that's NH's quandry. It's self-defeating for their meager resources to build out their transit out-of-sequence when the Capitol Corridor is such a fat target unparalleled by any other.
As for whether it's better to shoehorn the Portsmouth Branch via the Western Route Mainline to fit them in than the Eastern Route...maybe as a temporary solution combined with some freight upgrades to the Naval Shipyard, where Pan Am has strategic customers and desire to sign on more business. Like...60 MPH/Class 3 track tops that's going to do the max a freight carrier would ever want but not waste too much additional upgrade frills on pure passenger needs. That can patch them along, but problems are lack of population density on that Plaistow-Exeter-Newmarket-Portsmouth corridor, and severe freight congestion on the mainline to Lawrence that's going to keep service levels poorer than it needs to be for a city like that. Much more problematic than the MA portion of the Haverhill Line to Plaistow, which is only traveling through 8 miles of the worst of the freight congestion at the very end of the line on track owned and dispatched by the MBTA, not Pan Am.
But the T isn't going to be interested in doing out-of-state mercenary service over that. The Western Route brings little additional traffic relief to MA through the sparser Plaistow-Newfields stretch, the freight congestion is very heavy and dispatched past Plaistow by Pan Am, and the headways wouldn't be achievably dense to draw the kind of tix revenue that would intrigue them. They only want Plaistow for the more spacious layover space, which allows increases to the Haverhill schedule they can't get by staying at Bradford. The station's a cheap throw-in to draw revenue out of their preferred yard siting instead of deadheading trains for storage out of Haverhill. They would be interested in the Eastern Route straight up to Portsmouth because the I-95 diversions have significant impacts on MA in Seabrook all the way up. Same reason they're happy as clams to be operator to Concord along Route 3 or anywhere in Rhode Island along 95. But there's no parallel highways on the Western Route. They want ticket profits out out of these out-of-state deals, not simply to have costs subsidized for them at no net-gain.
Basically, a spur to Portsmouth would have to be pitched as a "well, we were gonna need to do this soley for freight regardless, so let's move it up the queue and milk it for some extra." Use that for route-priming for 8 years while they initiate formal planning to bring the Eastern Route back up there for a bona fide high-density commuter trip. But the planning for the Branch upgrade stopgap and the real-deal Eastern Route extension would have to go hand-in-hand. And the daunting task for getting anything going hand-in-hand is that NH is first going to have to get out of this dysfunctional rail vs. car, one-mode-must-defeat-the-other mindset before it can sanely plan anything. They don't even fund the in-state Downeaster stops as-is they're so incapable of agreeing amongst themselves.
F-Line to Dudley
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Re: New salem mbta CR station
NH is doing heavy public input for the revamp of its State Rail Plan, last revised in '01. I think the final-draft document comes out for all to read by year's end or very early 2013. Those state plans are all data bonanzas...really interesting stuff. Moreso for freight, but gives good perspective what lines are most multi-purpose, where there's the most overlap for freight and passenger gains, and where there's private investment interest to tap. MA's is interesting, although kind of depressing for how much the T ignores its own boss agency's recommendations. CT I would say has the most impressively exhaustive Plan of all the New England states.
For a state like NH the freight loads and need to upgrade that capacity are the real drivers for their rail investments, so the document may help calm some of the ideological shouting by showing where freight revenue can lead passenger investment by the nose. They seem to have no current ability to conceptualize the Downeaster in terms of what that investment has done for Pan Am's volumes from their bread-and-butter paper mill business in Maine, and their partnership in MA with Norfolk Southern for bulk transporting cross-country. Freight's use of the Maine-, Mass.-, and Fed-paid upgrades of the Downeaster are way more important to the NH economy than an Amtrak route in a vacuum (which they have no interest in paying to maintain because they only see it in a vacuum). VT has been much more on-point about that in its state plans. The Vermonter upgrades are allllll about opening up the NECR mainline as 'the' Canadian goods rail pipeline into New England and wringing every bit of mutual benefit out of that for Amtrak. Public-private, public-private, public-private...to the hilt.
NH is doing heavy public input for the revamp of its State Rail Plan, last revised in '01. I think the final-draft document comes out for all to read by year's end or very early 2013. Those state plans are all data bonanzas...really interesting stuff. Moreso for freight, but gives good perspective what lines are most multi-purpose, where there's the most overlap for freight and passenger gains, and where there's private investment interest to tap. MA's is interesting, although kind of depressing for how much the T ignores its own boss agency's recommendations. CT I would say has the most impressively exhaustive Plan of all the New England states.
For a state like NH the freight loads and need to upgrade that capacity are the real drivers for their rail investments, so the document may help calm some of the ideological shouting by showing where freight revenue can lead passenger investment by the nose. They seem to have no current ability to conceptualize the Downeaster in terms of what that investment has done for Pan Am's volumes from their bread-and-butter paper mill business in Maine, and their partnership in MA with Norfolk Southern for bulk transporting cross-country. Freight's use of the Maine-, Mass.-, and Fed-paid upgrades of the Downeaster are way more important to the NH economy than an Amtrak route in a vacuum (which they have no interest in paying to maintain because they only see it in a vacuum). VT has been much more on-point about that in its state plans. The Vermonter upgrades are allllll about opening up the NECR mainline as 'the' Canadian goods rail pipeline into New England and wringing every bit of mutual benefit out of that for Amtrak. Public-private, public-private, public-private...to the hilt.