Crazy Transit Pitches

[F-Line to Dudley]

RE: the "Red X", also keep in mind that the switch-off allows for more flexibility in variable-length "X" legs than the current branching scheme where longer Braintree has to remain in perfect balance with shorter/stop-denser Ashmont. Such that a Mattapan swallow w/ Milton intermediate by Ashmont would practically have to be compensated with a Neponset/Port Norfolk infill on Braintree to keep similar semblance of schedule parity to JFK where 6-on-6 min. headways = 3 min. mainline headway and straight-up alternating Braintree/Ashmont on the 3's.

You have a little more flexibility with the switch off to alternating legs of the "X" because the line is instead being dispatched much more as two independent end-to-enders that just so happen to cross via Columbia grade separation. So for example, a Phase I Congress St. subway to Community College doesn't have to worry excessively about matching Alewife exactly in schedule length. There can be more bunching/gapping within the 3 min. reference headway at the JFK-proper platforms (which can more than handle it @ quad-track w/ crossovers) on the trading-off maneuver than the immaculate balance that has to be retained for today's service. That aids future planning in:

• No excessive urgency to know where you're extending ASAP from the northside portal. As mentioned, the studies really have to be thorough to pick the best choose-your-adventure route so rushing it only invites unintended consequences.
• Being able to plan the past-CC route without having to worry about lengthening past Alewife in tandem for schedule balance. Or vice versa. Woburn is longer than Arlington Heights, for instance...but there's no dependency on how you chunk out the builds if Lexington is still a longshot or Winchester Ctr. is an easier Phase I'ing of the GLX Medford conversion than Anderson. This gets even more important when studying out the other crayon-draw build Alts.
• Southern extension possibilities no longer have to schedule-balance Braintree vs. Ashmont. Braintree basically has no further extension possibilities...it's already hit 128, side room along any of the Old Colony branches is wildly unrealistic, density drops way off in Weymouth or Randolph past that stop. But Ashmont arguably still has life in it past Mattapan as 1/2 mile of stationless subway under River St. anchored to a hard Neponset granite seam opens up the quad-track Fairmount Line grading south of Blue Hill Ave. to Readville for side-by-siding of rapid transit through Hyde Park. And possible continuation to Dedham Center on the grade-separated Dedham Branch ROW. This would make Ashmont significantly longer on the schedule than Braintree because there's some very high-leverage new destinations tapped like HP/Cleary Sq. and Dedham C. But that ceases to be any concern when branch schedules no longer have to be pair-matched at all from a single northern main.
• Run-as-directeds are way easier to plug if there is a (temporary or permanent) jarring mismatch in end-to-end'er lengths. For example, if Phase I of the "X" build has to terminate at North Station or Community College, you may be backfilling some headways through JFK to adjust for the longer travel times on the Alewife leg. So maybe for the (more important) sake of just upholding the 3 min. overall churn the pair-offs feature a higher ratio of one point of origin/destination over another through JFK. It's a kludge in the sense that it's less 'elegant' than a straight faithful ALW-ASH / NS-BRN / ALW-BRN / NS-ASH rotation and some pairings may notice a little 'wobble' in end-to-end frequencies. But in the end everyone's still pounded out to rote "3-min. any-train" frequencies from their local platform as most important consideration. If the base frequency is upheld, then a little necessary schedule-churn 'wobble' on the 4-way pairing rotation is a tradeoff riders will happily take.

In short, for ops it's basically like you have two totally different end-to-end color lines run no different than self-contained linear Orange or Blue...like a "Magenta" line and a "Pink" line. Only because of the properties of Columbia Jct. on one trip "Magenta" is Arlington Heights-Braintree and "Pink" is Woburn-Dedham Center...but on the next trip "Magenta" is "Arlington Heights-Dedham" and "Pink" is "Woburn-Braintree". Still run like self-contained end-to-enders agnostic to needle-threaded timing of branch splits, but almost like the "X" is a spinning wheel of changing 'color' lines instead. It's a very elegant layout on scalability and flexibility.

 

[Wash]

Tunnel was always to continue to Mill St. then pop up behind the high school. It's so buffered with so much adjacent greenspace and city parks that rail-with-trail the 1 mile to Heights is no issue. Lexington is probably beyond hope, but just get it to Heights first before worrying about them.

Those same red line plans depended on the station itself being plopped down on a parcel of land currently occupied by a three-story nursing home. Without tearing the nursing home down, the only way to build any Arlington Heights station on the surface is to take land on the Arlington Coal and Lumber lot. Also, the original study planned for a three-story parking garage and locals were still concerned about people driving in from Lexington. Unless paired with a major bus redesign (and there's no room for bus lanes on Mass Ave west of Arlington Heights), the project is infesible.

All that is to say that RLX-Arlington Center is *far* easier than RLX-Arlington Heights, and offers many of the same benefits.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Those same red line plans depended on the station itself being plopped down on a parcel of land currently occupied by a three-story nursing home. Without tearing the nursing home down, the only way to build any Arlington Heights station on the surface is to take land on the Arlington Coal and Lumber lot. Also, the original study planned for a three-story parking garage and locals were still concerned about people driving in from Lexington. Unless paired with a major bus redesign (and there's no room for bus lanes on Mass Ave west of Arlington Heights), the project is infesible.

All that is to say that RLX-Arlington Center is *far* easier than RLX-Arlington Heights, and offers many of the same benefits.

I don't know which variation of the plans the nursing home was involved in...but the most oft-cited ones didn't involve any land-taking except for Arlington Coal & Lumber for the end-of-line layover yard. The 1970's study went in similar fashion as most...3+ Alternatives worked up and a Preferred Alternative chosen. If land-takings were talked up on any of the Alt. variations, they were certainly pounded out during the synthesis phase that netted the Preferred Alt. (and definitely parking garage wouldn't be featured at all today because that's completely inappropriate for the location and bus route relocations from Alewife + the 2 frontage roads to new AH terminal would be the main multimodal driver). The Preferred Alt. as we understand it rehashable today doesn't do any consequential takings. AC headhouse is most frequently depicted corner of the block in the park in a Davis-like setup with the municipal lot on Mystic repurposed (in similar Davis-clone style) as the busway + kiss-and-ride. AH is most frequently depicted inside the Lowell/Park Ave. triangle with the little Park West Plaza strip mall on the corner giving way to primary station interface and probably a TOD flip of Alpha Collision Center for tying the Mass Ave.-facing side of the block in. Footprint of Arlington Coal & Lumber plus backlot of the current bus station serve up enough room for tail tracks framed inside of an Asmont-style turning loop.

If everything is tunneled on-footprint to Mill St. in carbon copy of Davis-Alewife and Alewife-Thorndike Field then there's no lasting surface disruption anywhere on the first 1.5 miles of extension. Portal past Mill behind the high school field is on an 85 ft. wide tree berm to Grove St., 50 ft. wide berm behind Brattle Dr. to Brattle Court...all easy to rail-with-trail. Then it abuts the city park for 1800 ft. to Forest St...path can dip into the park and not be in eyesight of the transit line at all. Then back to 60 ft. wide in the embankment cut from there to AH...some hillside reshaping for more rail-with-trail. Past Park Ave. it's back on the stet Minuteman footprint because the layover yard would abut all-south of the mainline ROW on the AC&L parcel.


What am I missing here? There's zero land-taking except for a strip mall with massage parlor + Chinese takeout place @ the AH triangle, and Arlington Coal & Lumber who've known for 45 years they've been on that hotseat. That's it. Zero trail breaks...Thorndike Field to the high school is just a series of 2-year shutdowns while they construct then put the surface back together. Then just 1.4 miles of Minuteman re-accommodation past the high school, the quarter-length of that stretch in the middle overlapping existing city parks and netting superior trail over today from the more recreation-inclusive positioning. If the town at-large isn't against it anymore for the same "undesireables" reasoning of the 70's, there should be absolute zero NIMBY vectors here the way it's constructed and less-than-zero Friends-o'-Minuteman kvetching because of the effortless re-accommodation Mill to Heights. As always, Lexington is a whole other ballgame with steeper tradeoffs...but also one not worth speculating on at all until the flag gets planted first at Heights.

 

[George_Apley]

I do think any major modifications to the Minuteman to make room for RLX, especially ones that lead to more severe grade changes and/or adds more grade-crossings would be massively fought by a predictably small but vocal group.

 

[ra84970]

I feel like the Red-X that's always in my mind is:

RedWest - Waltham Central Square - Watertown Square - Harvard
RedNorthWest - Arlington Heights - Harvard
RedCore - Harvard-JFK/UMass
RedSouth - JFK/UMass - Mattapan
RedSouthShore - JFK/UMass -Braintree

 

[George_Apley]

Branching from Harvard is definitely going to be a big no-no.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Branching from Harvard is definitely going to be a big no-no.

Anything that overloads the extremely brittle mainline that much more with alternating-frequency meets is going to collapse the whole works. We can figure that projecting forward right now from 2020 these projects are mandatory undertakings in the next 10-, 15-, and 20-year spans to keep the fully-stet Red mainline from choking on its own dwells to a point where 3 min. target headways are no longer sustainable in the face of guaranteed growth:

• Build Red-Blue to defray the double-transfer crowds.
• Build new egresses at Park Street Under to defray platform bunching + substantial new/enhanced-egress investment at Downtown Crossing
• Transitway-to-Green Line connector

All of those--including the multi-$B's Transitway-Downtown fix--are mandatory just for projected growth on what we have today. NSRL introduces a whole other wildcard. We have a *rough* feel based on where ridership patterns would trend in a unified Regional Rail system that the Orange Line would probably see a significant amount of load relief between Back Bay and North Station from run-thru service, but conversely Red would probably see a large INCREASE from 3 of 4 northside mains gaining a direct transfer they've never had before. So you can immediately chalk up Urban Ring as a necessary rapid transit augmentation for being able to shuffle North Shore riders in particular out to Kendall and Harvard; that's sort of the ultimate long-game payout of the Sullivan Superstation idea.

But the thing about projecting NSRL patterns is that it's so many degrees-of-separation removed from the system we have today that speculating on wholesale commuter behavior changes is nearly impossible. You can guess at low to high ranges...but those ranges of potential growth are almost uncalculably wide. So say you do ^^all of the above builds^^ to fortify the Red main against projected growth. What happens then if the northside transferee swells enabled by NSRL are not just big but mega. Not only are you not hanging the "Mission Accomplished" sign and hurling headlong into building a northern branch that has to stay in immaculate balance with the main, you're right back where you started looking at Park/DTX/SS dwell swells becoming the undoing of the entire system. What's next...spending another NSRL price tag's worth quad-tracking Red between Columbia portal and Harvard???

The saving grace of the "X" conjoined at JFK with no physical overlap of its alternating patterns is that it has the ironlcad answer for the NSRL scenario that just so happens to break 'mega' and dump unforeseen new loads on Red. The alt-spining of Downtown diffuses the line transfer crowds on a second mainline so Park/DTX...and Kendall, since the Green transfers @ Haymarket/NS offer the Urban Ring directs...don't again flare up as the places dwells make schedule adherence go to die. It is the perma-killshot for the uppermost-bound midcentury growth projections. So while today it is not a build under serious consideration, someday we may thank our lucky stars that this Congress St. alignment--such a very bad capacity fit for NSRL--was scoped out as build-viable for some sort of future use. We might well need to tap the resource non-optionally if northside-to-Red dumps go absolute mega in an unpredictable post-NSRL ridership world.

--------------------

There's that, and the fact that actual study ridership at Harvard indicates higher demand for radial, not thru service. East Watertown via Mt. Auburn St. was the projected extension route from 1945 to the 1970's until Mass Ave. took favor, and the '45 plan East Watertown as the HRT terminal with a trolley dinky to Alewife and Arlington Heights that could've easily extended to Watertown as a 71 replacement when freight service died down in that direction. That or HRT could've indeed been split there. So this isn't a new idea at all. But by 1975 the growth projections tilted so heavily via Porter and Davis that East Watertown quickly became non-preferred.

You can hardly find fault with that call today for what ridership exists on the Alewife extension. While Porter can be augmented by a GLX poke, Davis would be moderately hurt by the permanent reduction from 3 to 6 minute headways (despite several of its large-ridership connecting buses being bolstered by GLX down the street), and Alewife would be thrown into crisis as there is no effective headway augmentation with the Fitchburg ROW being uselessly far detached down the street to work any sort of tandem load-spreading with the main station. Alewife/Concord Ave. growth, in part because of Cambridge's lackadaisical planning there, is basically unchecked. I shudder to think what carpocalypse awaits if the boom gets lowered permanently on headways.

And Harvard augmentation has thoroughly and consistently tilted hard to trans-Allston linkage with the Urban Ring spur. They need a service filet with directs to the Green Line at Kenmore to save the 66 from overload, BU and Regional Rail linkage at West Station, a Kendall direct, and some manner of radial linkage between next-largest mega bus terminal Sullivan which some Ring run-thrus and other Lechmere cross-platform transfers enable way better than trying to BRT the un-BRT'able 86. It's not difficult at all to get to Watertown from Harvard; the 71 is a high-performing key route that's ripe for BRT enhancement. 30 years of studying points the transit urgency squarely in the radial, not linear direction. Branching, for all its pitfalls, is also the answer looking to a question that's not being asked.

 

[Charlie_mta]

• Build Red-Blue to defray the double-transfer crowds.
• Build new egresses at Park Street Under to defray platform bunching + substantial new/enhanced-egress investment at Downtown Crossing
• Transitway-to-Green Line connector

That list is most important one I've seen on here. Massachusetts' Senators and Congressional delegation should be pushing hard for Federal funding for this. The next highway bill to replace the almost expired FAST Act really needs to include enough transit funding to provide for these three projects.

 

[Stlin]

Why would it be bugfark crazy to fork the Blue Line say, just South of Wood Island to run up the SL3 alignment? BLX Lynn isn't getting built anytime soon, and RUR will ease the load @ your Lynn bus terminal a fair bit. Just create a portal @ Martin Coughlin Bypass Rd, (which is old Eastern/B&M, and quite lightly used; Chelsea and Neptune are more than adequate) convert and use that RoW, which is completely grade seperated to and including Curtis. Relocate the MWRA Caruso Pumping station, and cross the "creek." This would be v expensive, but probably well within a Bill, despite one having to maintain -40ft to +175ft clearances. Given a bridge is wildly impractical, it's only 500m of tunnel, and that channel is wholly artificial anyways.

And, given that most of this would be in in industrial areas, it may be possible to refork and run up the Eastern Branch by creating a wye with a single leg through in that industrial park off Eastern St. Basically, recreate and improve the Eastern. If you do this, the leg to wonderland could be shuttle-fied and converted to forced transfer @ airport or relocated Wood Island, as good chunk of Wonderland ridership, as you say, would be sucked off onto Blue @ Lynn.

I don't even think you need a new station before crossing the creek; you'd only be serving a fuel farm. *Maybe* relocate Wood Island if you need more platforms and tracks. I do concede I don't necessarily think this is a good thing for the Newburyport/Rockport lines.

 

[KCasiglio]

Proposing a forced transfer at airport the day after 10k units get approved for Suffolk Downs seems...less than ideal to me.

As fas as the branch, I -think- if you did it simultaneously with BLX Lynn it wouldn't blow up things too badly since you're eliminating Wonderland as super-feeder station. But Lynn center could turn into just as critical a bus transfer station. Maybe its just Quincy Center and can take a branching, even still, I don't think it's worth cutting frequencies in such a high growth area just to get a spur into Chelsea, and nothing past that has a density demanding heavy rail.

 

[Stlin]

Proposing a forced transfer at airport the day after 10k units get approved for Suffolk Downs seems...less than ideal to me.

Ah. Yea... Thats fair. I still haven't caught up on this week's news.

 

[Wash]

Apparently, in the late 1960s, British rail used to run services from London to Weymouth in a very interesting way. According to the clip linked below (skip to seven minutes in), the EMUS ran under their own power from London to Bournemouth (where the third rail ended), then were coupled to diesel locomotives and hauled as regular coaching stock for the rest of their journey to Weymouth.

Is there any reason (besides time) that this couldn't work for some commuter rail lines in Boston? Thinking specifically about Newburyport/Rockport here. Granted, the FRA would have a coronary, but that's why this is in crazy transit pitches.

The offending video:

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Apparently, in the late 1960s, British rail used to run services from London to Weymouth in a very interesting way. According to the clip linked below (skip to seven minutes in), the EMUS ran under their own power from London to Bournemouth (where the third rail ended), then were coupled to diesel locomotives and hauled as regular coaching stock for the rest of their journey to Weymouth.

Is there any reason (besides time) that this couldn't work for some commuter rail lines in Boston? Thinking specifically about Newburyport/Rockport here. Granted, the FRA would have a coronary, but that's why this is in crazy transit pitches.

The offending video:

Whether you technologically can or can't depends on how the trainlining systems were designed.

Locomotives
In loco-haul (diesel or electric loco) it's pretty basic and universal: a passenger locomotive locomotive pipes Head End Power (HEP) electricity to all the coaches (North American standard is three-phase 480V AC) via pass-thru power plugs in the couplers. HEP power gets generated either from an AC inverter (all electric locos, most modern diesels like the T's HSP-46 and Amtrak Siemens Charger, and some older locos like the Amtrak GE Genesis and oldest "Screamer"-generation F40PH) or by a small auxiliary diesel generator separate from the main engine (like the T's 2nd/3rd-gen F40PH's, GP40MC's, MP36's + many others). And then there's a whole bunch of math to factor on HEP rating of the locomotive vs. HEP loading of the coaches (# of coaches, how much HVAC load they're each sucking up, etc.) and how much the HEP is siphoning from the propulsion electricity budget...all of which determines how powerful (horsepower, tractive effort, etc.) a locomotive you need to use or when it's time to attach a second locomotive to the set.

Then...apart from HEP, you have the dirt-simple pass-thru control cable for push-pull ops. Which simply allows a remote control stand on the opposite end of the train drive the train in reverse. The remote controls either being in a cab car or a second locomotive that may or may not be powered up. That cable is inert where it passes through all the middle cars.

Note that nearly all freight locomotives, unless specifically modified to pinch-hit for passenger duty, have no HEP electricity generation capability and are not configured for push-pull controls. Freight cars are inert except for the shared air brake line, and any cars needing electricity (like a refrigerator car) have small self-contained electrical generators for that task. And freights have to be controlled from the forward position only, meaning they have to run the loco(s) around the train and reattach in the opposite direction to go full-speed in reverse (with many makes having rear control stands for bi-directional running). The only exception to this is a "Distributed Power" (DPU) setup where some radio/computer trickery allows for mid-train helper locomotives whose throttle is remotely controlled from the front-facing loco(s)...but no real push-pull.


xMU's
Trainlining is usually way different on EMU's/DMU's. Design defaults usually prioritize keeping the weight of the self-propelled car guts down. That means that in most cases the HEP inverters are only big enough to portion out coach electricity for the self-propelled car (or car pair/triplet) itself and not any adjacent unpowered coaches. Metro North's unpowered M8 singlet trailers, for example, have to have their own pantographs strictly for keeping the lights/HVAC on because the self-powered cars they're attached to have no juice to spare for that purpose. In other makes there'll be more HEP allowance, but only enough to light up 1...at most 2...adjacent unpowered cars. Even the new Bombardier MLV EMU, the great white 'hybridization' hope for using off-shelf coaches in a self-powered set, is only capable of powering 2 stock bi-level coaches off each self-powered car. You have to keep adding +1 power cars to the set for every +2 stock trailers to chain 'em up in balance with the electricity budget.

That's simple physics...the more unpowered cars in tow, the more HEP capacity you need and the bigger/heavier the AC inverter guts get. Until you reach a threshold where loco-haul (especially electric loco-haul) is simply more efficient by virtue of packing all of that extra inverter/transformer weight into one carbody instead of every carbody.

Add to that the fact that the control cabling for xMU trainlining is usually a lot more finely-tuned than push-pull. Having a 'talky' data connection between self-powered cars makes it easier to smooth out the propulsion without adding weight-bloating components. So most EMU's aren't designed for compatibility with push-pull. They can dead-tow rescue a stranded loco-haul train, and be dead-towed in loco-haul by a rescue engine...but usually at sharply degraded ride quality, non-compatibility with the loco's HEP cables (so it's a tow in the dark), or increased component wear if it's done too often. On Budd RDC's, despite their dirt simplicity, you were in full violation of the manufactuer warranty if you tried to run them with stock coaches in a non-emergency situation; you had to buy one of Budd's custom unpowered RDC trailers to do mixed powered sets within the design tolerances. So the market has always been very limited for 'hybridized' sets because of the design overbuilds required to stretch the systems. That's getting much better now as computer controls take over, replacing custom trainlining relays with generic data fiber. That's how the Bombardier MLV EMU is able to interface with stock coaches sans excess wear profile where that wasn't easily possible earlier; the computer brain has absorbed all the smoothing-over tricks for balancing the trainlining. But there's still sharp upper limits to how far generic-design makes will stretch themselves. Ask for more, and you start adding weight-bloating cost premiums as basic cost of doing business.


So in the case of that British example you linked you've got an intentional overdesign for the "deadweight" capability of attaching the unpowered diesel that gets fired up after leaving electric territory. That's perfectly valid if you've got an application with enough scale to make it work...but it does mean that the EMU's have to be overdesigned-above-baseline for hauling the extra deadweight and be configured out-of-box with dual trainlining circuitry (all of which was a lot harder in the 1960's). Totally doable, but the price and maintenance premium is icky to say the least. In the UK, a lot of routes that used to do that have been replaced with "DEMU's", or dual-mode MU's. In North America there's really nothing of any scale where paying that premium makes a lick of sense, unless you've got an unventilated tunnel in-play. But even there it's easier to run push-pull with a suitably powerful dual-mode loco like NJ Transit's Bombardier ALP-45DP rather than splitting the difference with EMU's towing stock diesel deadweight to a power change point. NJT will gain exactly that capability with the MLV EMU power cars to tow a locomotive through electric territory to the diesel changeover, and Bombardier advertised that as a perk in its MLV EMU presentation to the T. But in practicality NJT would never opt to do that when they already have a large roster of dual-mode locos to run those routes as push-pull. The ALP's are expensive and overweight beasts, but they have plenty enough zip in E-mode for push-pull that it would be pure waste to assign the self-propelled fleet to those hybrid routes.

Same lousy costs trying to do that on the Eastern Route. It flat-out costs less in the end to electrify ALL of Rockburyport one-and-done rather than skew a procurement for 15-year bridge era of vehicle-side kludges. We don't even have an unventilated tunnel yet, so dual-mode anything is too-shitty economically for the system we have. For purposes of the Rail Vision they have to troubleshoot the half-measure Eastern Route plan. Either it needs way more funds to go all the way to the branch endpoints, large-scale Salem (or Peabody) turnbacks so there's enough electric frequencies for service starts...or (likely) concede that they're not budgeted well enough to tackle the northside on Phase I and that money is better spent wiring up another southside line and implementing full pan-northside diesel RUR first, then earmarking Phase II a much bigger north-centric electric splash. There isn't any side option that points to vehicle-side trickery as an economically sustainable foot in the door; TransitMatters has done plenty of research showing how bad a value dual-modeing (of any kind) is for the rollout and very strongly discourages going there.

 

[Stlin]

That's getting much better now as computer controls take over, replacing custom trainlining relays with generic data fiber.

To a certain extent. Working in the datacoms industry, every digital trainline comm/control scheme that's crossed my desk is a) european, and b) if optical still goes through an optical switch and copper connectors and jumpers. Those media converters are actually digital to parallel, ie already obsolete; we already consider the IEC spec a legacy system. Usually it only gets chosen bc of the transmit distance; twisted pair ethernet is good up to ~200m, while optical is good up to 2000m, but this can be obviated with repeaters. (This is why the US 27pin is so huge; it's rated for 600v with a nominal voltage of 74v per pin so you can actually get signal to the other end after transmission losses) Besides, no one wants to maintain an outdoor, all weather, all optical comms system except militaries, because this is *hella expensive*. Optical interfaces and switches are fundamentally more complex and harder to repair, and don't tend to do well with dust, water, or vibration, especially in combination. Copper is just a far more tolerant medium, despite far lower bandwidth, but at IEC 1m/s, it doesn't really matter.

The US... is a bit behind. While it's definitely all going to multifunction digital signalling eventually, to date no US standard has been identified for this. Last I heard, the FRA and FTA were investigating wireless tech. in the US I believe that 27 pin analog is still the only approved standard for both comm and control (MU), and the only exceptions I am aware of would be in fixed consist deployments; ie stadler, where I believe they've ported the european control and comm systems. The tech could have changed recently though; it's been a few years (~2015) since I've seen one.

 

[Andrew]

Wondering if the hypothetical Porter Square renders from Alex Hogrefe/@visualizing_architecture have ever been discussed here. I'm not sure how I feel about them (more views here and here) but it feels like a crazy pitch by Boston station standards.

I don't think the large structure makes sense for the otherwise short area, but I do like how the commuter rail feels less hidden away than it does now. Granted it's probably also helpful that these renders don't have to deal with practical concerns like ventilation (I assume that's what the large windowless building over the CR tracks is for, right?)

 

[stefal]

Another one.

I like it. I don't think the T would adopt as bold of a design language as this, but its fun to look at and think about, which is his purpose in these.

I don't think its too tall, either. I think the height actually kind of works.

 

[HenryAlan]

Those renders are pretty cool. Is there a need to re-do Porter Square? The 'T has shown some inclination toward bold head house design on some of the recent updates (eg Government Center), but unless there are issues around safety or ADA at Porter, there is no reason to mess with the existing station.

 

[stefal]

Those renders are pretty cool. Is there a need to re-do Porter Square? The 'T has shown some inclination toward bold head house design on some of the recent updates (eg Government Center), but unless there are issues around safety or ADA at Porter, there is no reason to mess with the existing station.

Porter's likely very low on the list of priority renovations. It is an interesting side project to take on, like he did here.

On the note about headhouse design, I'm looking forward to the final design for the new Kendall headhouse as part of the MIT Kendall/East Campus projects. The preliminary renders showed a pretty bold, thin cantilevered roof over glass walls. It will be interesting to see how the MBTA handles/reviews it.

 

[jbray]

Maybe a concept for when the green line ends up at Porter? Can't say I'm enthusiastic about the staircase to nowhere replacing the trees in the park. Porter is already a desolate wasteland of concrete which becomes especially apparent when you go back and forth between Porter and Davis. That and the fact that they continue to plant partial-shade plants (usually New Guinea Impatiens) in the full sun island at the junction of Somerville Ave/Mass Ave.

Also, let Porter have a canopy for its CR platform. Other than that, I am all onboard for this type of redesign.

 

[BosMaineiac]

Hey everyone,

I found out about this website quite a while ago and have been browsing regularly, but decided it was time to register and start adding my two cents. I’m a Structural Engineer at a large firm in Boston and want to make clear that everything I post is mine and in no way related to the company (or clients) I work for.

When I moved to Boston and found out about the NSRL I immediately fell in love with the dream piece of infrastructure. The more I’ve learned about it and it’s history the more I felt it was a no brainer for regional mobility. Being from Maine and a regular on the Downeaster, the benefits were even more apparent to me. Since it’s looking like it will likely be decades before the first shovel breaks ground (or TBM arrives), I took a good look at how this project could benefit even more people. So I present to you the NSEW Rail Link.

I chose the DOT preferred South/Congress alignment for the NSRL portion of the Link, with the addition of North Station Under. The EW tunnel will bring airport access and also minimize the need for BLX. The EW alignment follows the East Boston Greenway and Route 1A. The eastern portal could be where the oil tanks are and the abandoned ROW becomes more defined. The Old Colony line portal was not included in the most recent DOT study but I included it for increased capacity. As you can see I incorporated or noted some other fantasy projects like the APM to emphasize the mobility opportunities.

Let me know what you think!