Ruling this as "Crazy" and not "God" pitch on these grounds:
Acquire right-of-way to Bradley Field, Windsor and Windsor Locks
OK...so as I remember vividly from my youth in CT, ConnDOT once studied (into the ground) making a light rail circulator between Hartford Union Station and Bradley Airport using the ROW of the Griffins Secondary freight line to Bloomfield and some TBD acquisitions of power line company ROW to the Bradley Airport terminals. Stops would've served Hartford's dense north end, University of Hartford campus, Route 218 Bloomfield, Downtown Bloomfield, and the Day Hill business park by CT 187 before crossing the Farmington River and going to the Airport. Two-time incarcerated federal inmate Gov. Rowland turfed the LRT study immediately upon taking office just as the torturous debate was hitting the Legislature about funding, replacing it with a tankapalooza busway study (Rowly did lots of busway studies...his underpants were also ripe with the smell of payola from private bus companies and BRT astroturfers, so there wasn't a ROW he
didn't blow money paper-studying buses on).
In the years since 1995 the Griffins Secondary went from an out-of-service Guilford/Pan Am dispersal back to a quite busy freight branch again under the tutelage of homeless-man's shortline Central New England RR (basically the one-man brainchild of owner A.J. Beliveau, who squeezed blood from stone to revive both the west-of-river Griffins and east-of-river Armory Branch from the dead on shoestring budget). LRT not really an option anymore because of the revived freight activity. The Hartford Line was born into a more modern era, now New England's most bullish growth prospect as it slow-cooks to more RUR-like featuring. And Rowland went to prison not once but twice. Because majority of the ROW from end-of-track on the Griffins to East Granby is under sole-owner lock and key of Connecticut Light & Power (with a FAT median and nicely-graded access road through the middle ripe for reappropriation), ConnDOT keeps a toehold on acquisition of that property by earmarking it in the tertiary/miscellany priorities of every State Rail Plan revision (as you can see from PDF page linky above). Current valuation is $3M for the buy-to-landbank from CL&P.
They're still--haplessly--studying Bradley Airport rail options. And as you can see from the linked study (reading optional)...not really getting too far with that. Various floated proposals for a Bradley Branch dinky have gone nowhere, mainly because as a shuttle routing it doesn't beat a straight bus from the upcoming relocated Windsor Locks Depot to be worth spending any money on. They're not keen on reviving the Griffins plan out of trauma for how bitterly that ended in the mid-90's and because it's "big" thinking. The rest of the study schemes are just throwing shit at the wall in desperation that they want
something rail-branded™ to the airport Terminal but don't want to pay a lot for it, and have read too many warning posts in the online Transpo Intelligencia that mainline rail airport connectors are heinously overrated.
In short...ConnDOT needs a swift kick in the pants to get its head around this. Presenting:
Griffins Urban Rail.
Basically the routing repeat of the Major Investment Study, but done as mainline RR mode because of the active freight. This is a dense-stop EMU service primarily drawing from Bloomfield-in and cast in contrast to the paralleling Hartford Line for the short-haul density hugging the North End neighborhood alignment vs. the sparser/faster river alignment. Run 15 mins. frequent with *short* consists. And work the bus connections to the hilt, because the density mix is perfect for that with all the thick residential, UHart, and the business parks. The Griffins unfortunately has a shitload of grade crossings, but by keeping to the short-sets/dense-spacing motif it makes appropriate use of the infrastructure without overtaxing itself.
The CL&P ROW conversion is pretty cut-and-dried...just a new bridge passing over CT 189 + Farmington River, then straight-up regrade CL&P's gravel access road. Bonus by giving freight service to the very large East Granby trap rock quarry as a kingmaker sign-on for Central New England. That quarry pumps a lot of big truck traffic onto the local roads reaching back to CT 20/I-91. ROW between Hatchet Hill Rd. and Bradley is speculative, mostly splitting property lines. There are not enough total abutters here to cause any NIMBY problems, and the Griffins LRT MIS investigated that to death. All state land once you hit CT 20 (and actually some of the warehouses on International Drive immediately prior are on state-managed land catering to the airport). The actual Bradley Terminal station would front Schoepester Rd. in front of the long-term parking garage on semi-elevated structure for grade separation of the various lot driveways. There'd have to be a freight passing track here solely for managing freights' slowness around the adjacent sharp curves without fouling pax trains at the station stop. Service can either terminate at Windsor Locks on the Springfield Line or 'circuit' back to Hartford.
That's the base build. The most recent Bradley study's pooh-poohing of lack of Springfield-facing access made no sense when the grading is right there for adding a wye leg to the Springfield Line straight off the CT River Bridge onto the Bradley Branch. Depicted on the map accordingly. The Bradley Branch makes its distended 'hump' into Suffield nothingness because it was originally built as a fork off the Suffield Branch, which was abandoned in 2008 from the top of the 'hump' to Suffield Depot. There's straightening potential by cutting across the woods and a bunch of tobacco field property lines straight from the National Guard camp to the industrial park on CT 159 bypassing an empty 2.5 miles' worth of the 'hump'. It's about 1.2 miles worth of savings and a lot more straightness. I don't think that shortcut's anywhere near a high-leverage 'get', however, unless you run into an unusually smooth negotiation with the abutting landowners. The existing alignment looks fugly on a map, but does the job.
Accomplishments: traces a whole useful-unto-itself transit corridor with rich routing options. Fixes main flaw of back-and-forth 90's Griffins LRT terminating at the Airport with no 'circuit' ability or Springfield routing utility. Fixes the haplessness of the Windsor Locks-side Airport dinky offers no above-and-beyonds over the shuttle bus. Griffins corridor at-large is a pitch perfect case study for Urban Rail :15 utilization at dense stop spacing to dense environs. But the marriage with the airport is the critical-mass kick in the pants, differentiating it from the overrated "airport dinky" dreck. Despite the new-ROW mileage involved, half of the virgin routing being $3M cut-rate land buy from an amenable CL&P starts things off on very good footing and using the incumbent RR mode with its freight biz underwriting will take away a lot of the price shock the state struggled with when it was over-debating the original LRT option. Electrification doable on the whole length for 1 substation's cost, short sets and no Amtrak keeping the juice requirements on the low side. Obviously can also use this as a rainy-day Springfield Line pax bypass in the event of something catastrophic like an overtopped Connecticut River flooding the tracks (it happens).
Furthermore, the Springfield Line's in a little bit of a pickle for thru freight because of MassDOT's brain fart at attempting any preservation of the lapsed Armory Branch ROW in Longmeadow and Springfield. That's the high-and-wide route if you ever need to get intermodal down to Hartford/New Haven after the Springfield Line is electrified...so the (not totally fait-accompli, but mostly) loss hurts. A completely connected Griffins to Windsor Locks can recover *most* of MA's Armory brainfart by permitting high-and-wide alt routings from Hartford to Enfield, where points north the Springfield Line only has 3 overhead bridges the rest of the way to Springfield to treat with undercuts or unpowered passing tracks. The Griffins, owing to its status as somewhat of a grade crossing minefield, only has 4 overhead structures its entire active length, all of which can be very easily undercut for wires-over-freights. Bradley Branch has zero. CL&P ROW has zero. East Granby-Airport TBD connecting leg most likely has zero. Yep...ConnDOT will still rightly hold a grudge at MassDOT for pissing away the Armory connection, but there's an ace fumble recovery for you right there.
Throw this in the mix with HFD-Naugatuck Valley CR, some poke to Manchester that hopefully has shotgunning opportunities for reanimated Willimantic (then New London) connection with NEC FUTURE's help, and ever-diversifying Hartford Line layer cake and the Hartford Union network is really cooking with gas.
