Commuting Boston Student
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2) You can't achieve 1% grades in that location when the NECR mainline junctions and goes over a bridge less than 500 feet away from the platform. State Pier's a major freight terminal, and SLE's layover yard is supposed to be built on the cleared land over that bridge. Forget about relocating that junction...you've got the Gold Star Bridge, the State Pier Rd. overpass, Thames draw, the NECR bridge, 5 bridgelets on the NEC all within a 1000 ft. radius, and NECR has to have 22 ft. clearance (25 ft. if there's any overhead wires) to offload double-stack freight cars at the pier. Whatever you draw on a map to solve all these conflicts, it is >$1B, does not solve the curvature issues, and likely penalizes speeds worse than if you did nothing at all because of the grades required.
This is why Amtrak wants an Inland HSR route. The Shoreline is almost totally tapped out of improvements between New Haven and Westerly. They've got a couple passing sidings to add, the higher replacement Conn River Bridge to build in Old Saybrook, and can zap 6 or 7 of the 11 grade crossings pretty straightforwardly. But that's about it inside CT's borders. There isn't wiggle room for much else, and the above list will probably bee 100% accomplished by 2025. They are much, much more constrained here than they are DC-NHV where there's still shitloads of improvements to be realized on the existing ROW, or Westerly-Boston where tri-tracking capacity and commuter rail mitigation opens up a lot of slack space and the straightaways allow for 160+ MPH. But you're not fixing the Shoreline without bypassing it. Technical perfection ain't happening here. That point's already been long conceded.
See, I'm not trying to eliminate these grade crossings to improve speeds any. That's the disconnect here. I'm trying to eliminate the grade crossings to make the station at all usable as a terminal - which, if half or more (depending on whether the third track there ever sees use, which is likely) of your tracks are physically completely inaccessible to anybody for the duration of a train's stay at the station, it's not. Keep in mind that unlike passing-through Regionals or Acela Express trains, any terminating SLE is going to be on the platform for five minutes or more. This is not something that can be written off as "oh, well, it's never going to be technically perfect." Something has to be done here or, far from 'not technically perfect,' you're going to have 'not usable as a terminal.'
SLE is almost certainly going to run a full schedule to New London, and it's not all that much of a stretch to assume that Worcester-New London service is going to be on the map at some point. 'Not usable as a terminal' is not going to fly for very long with just one of these services running a full schedule, let alone two services coming from opposite directions. So, I'm open to suggestions for how we can solve this problem - but 'do nothing' isn't an option.