Riverworks gets a lot of ridership for a stop that's only used during shift changes at the GE plant. Per the Blue Book 140 boardings a day. That's more than West Gloucester or Waverley. And negligible difference from Chelsea (156 daily). For how few times a day it's used that's worth keeping as the plant has few other transit options that aren't a lousy walk to Route 1A or 107. It's not a schedule drag, they're under no obligation to ADA it, and it's already front-door boarding only so that doesn't restrict the auto door coaches. It can go if Blue comes to Lynn because they'll need a small West Lynn intermediate on that side of the river.
What is so special about GE Aviation that they managed to get themselves an employee-only stop? Seriously. Answer that for me and I'll be less infuriated by the existence of that stop.
Chelsea is pathetically handled. It's the last non-ADA full stop on the Eastern Route or either branch and for the bus density and pop density through there it needs more amenities than a tiny tincan shelter on 1 platform only. How 'bout a traffic light instead of stop signs at that uninviting intersection? Or real sidewalks? Or ramps from the Washington Ave. side? Or bus shelters for the 112, 114, and 111? Or a bike rack? Or a couple newspaper boxes? They keep talking about how very very important this stop is going to be for radial urban transit, but then leave it perpetually crippled and a flag stop.
I have no idea how much room we have to play with at Chelsea or how negotiable it's physical location is - and until I know those things, I can't make any concrete suggestions for what to do with it.
There's just too much around the tracks already for me to seriously suggest what I think the best possible solution is, that being picking up and moving the entire station one block over to sit between Broadway and Washington Avenue. There's definitely not enough room to work at it's current location, and the open space on the other side of the Expressway comes with the unfortunate caveat of "being on the wrong side of the expressway."
Maybe you could build out the actual station and have the Expressway running on its roof, which makes building
here look a whole lot better. Not to mention, building a new station means you get to keep the existing one active until the new one is ready to come online... but maybe that isn't much of a perk in this case.
Here probably works too, and provides enough room to fulfill the MBTA's garage fetish, plus ease of access to the Expressway... I don't know.
Huh? The Eastern Route has the densest off-peak schedule on the entire commuter rail. Better than Providence, which has a couple wide gaps around Amtrak slots. Freight runs 7 days a week to Everett Terminal and 3 days a week to Peabody on the mid-afternoon off-peak. The movable bridges cram most of their openings on the off-peak. It's doing about what it can do. Pretty well in fact by dancing around the other corridor users without over-long schedule gaps. They can pry some slots for Peabody/128 by fixing the Chelsea restrictions and avoiding the higher number of bridge openings at Beverly swing. Beverly's not going to be transit-deprived if fixing the restrictions also opens up more Newburyport and Rockport slots. The short-turns there are a function of capacity, not convenience. The single-track bottlenecks in the tunnel, at the Salem platform, and on the Newburyport branch make juggling train meets hard on end-to-enders. The short-turns exist as a shiv to do what they can up to the capacity cap. Doing it more comes at expense of branch service. You're not Fairmounting this line. It's not built for it.
40~80 minute gaps between trains outside of peak hours isn't exactly "great." I get that there are ruling metrics in play here, but surely we can get an average hourly wait down to 45 or 40 minutes on the off-peak times.
I acknowledge that there's no real reason other than capacity to short-turn at Beverly Depot, but I think there's enough give for an extra dozen trains provided we don't mess with the Newburyport Line any, or turn them out to Peabody.
The tracks can only be raised 13 feet at 1% RR grades with the available running space between the bridge and the School St. overpass. Go steeper than that and the climb induces a speed restriction akin to the very (too?) steep Mystic bridge. Any replacement will still have to be a movable bridge because it can't match the very steep climb of the Essex Bridge without doing more harm than good. That's OK, though...a dozen more feet cuts the bridge openings by about 80% and zaps the (minor) Congress St. grade crossing on the Beverly side as an added bonus. In-season a lot more boats use that channel than you might think. Danversport marina and the Crane and Waters River marinas collectively have close to 500 berths.
You're right, the marina traffic numbers are surprising to me - but once you start talking building a new bridge and all the expenses involved in that undertaking, the cost of blowing up and redoing one grade separation is really chump change in comparison.
Flip School Street to an underpass and that buys you an extra 1085 feet of running room. It looks like March Street has a boat launch at the end of it, so that probably needs to stay as an overpass, and we can't press farther than a Pleasant Street underpass without having to rework Beverly Depot... I'm going to give it an extra 24.5 feet max elevation if we're sticking to 1% grade and pushing it right up to the edges of our working room. That should be more than enough to let us go fixed.
Hell, if you want to smooth out the top of the bridge arc, I'd still be comfortable saying we have an extra 21 feet to work with in elevation.
Blue-Salem would not tunnel. That's not been proposed at all. It would terminate south-of-portal at Castle Hill Yard. The old south-of-portal Salem station was much more accessible to the whole of the downtown density and the college. It just had no parking, couldn't be ADA'd, and was dangerously narrow. North-of-portal is a parking pit not real ped-friendly, and bisected by the river and the icy winds off it. The neighborhoods north of the river are chopped up by 3 cemeteries and less-than-awesome ped access blunting the demand there, and the rest of that area north of the river would be better served out of Peabody Sq.
So of course the T is spending itself into oblivion building a Taj Mahal garage in the pit and making bad Route 107/114 traffic worse. The town wants South Salem back and it's so highly recommended in the North Shore Transit Improvements study because it's the traditionally superior location, Spaulding and Mass General Children's are right there, and the college has grown a lot (with the Salem-Marblehead rail trail providing extremely good access). Rapid transit ridership wouldn't merit the pain of going through the tunnel, much less all the tunneling required to net 2 x 2 tracks.
Hell...South Salem will probably have its own humongous parking garage built on Castle Hill Yard. That Taj Mahal they're building in the pit is gonna be one big expensive albatross in due time.
I think Blue-Salem is going to have to go all the way to the Taj Mahal Garage. I don't think they're going to find the will to build another garage on top of the yard and there's going to
have to be a Blue/CR meet somewhere in Salem.
I could see the argument for keeping Salem and South Salem both as CR stops, but I don't think anybody necessarily wants to do that, nor do I think that pushing all the CR/Blue transfers back to Lynn is the answer here.
It's a huge albatross to be certain, but I'm confident in saying that we're stuck with it.
They're not even certain they can do more tunneling. It's a built-up downtown and deep-boring isn't an option with the inclines involved right next to a very flood-prone river. Half of the existing tunnel is wider than the other half and might be able to be widened. But it might not. A parallel tunnel is going to impact building foundations; it might be no-go. They haven't priced it out...it's probably going to be more expensive than Red-Blue. It may take another 30+ years before they get a crack at that, especially with the movable bridges and the grade crossings giving them several hundred mil's worth of concrete to pour in the meantime.
The Eastern Route has got a ceiling that won't let it be all things to every constituency. Squinting ever harder isn't going to make the options appear that do it all for everyone or net anything close to a clock-facing schedule to Salem. The best thing they may be able to do in the interim to mitigate the tunnel is build South Salem + that second North Salem platform so train meets can be staged right at each tunnel portal instead of having to be coordinated all the way from Swampscott to Beverly. That's still not going to allow true splitting of the difference between inside-128 transit needs and outside-128 transit needs on one mode. It's not. The fact that rapid transit--if they ever get it to @#$% Lynn in the first place--is an unconstrained build to South Salem means commuter rail's best served by the 128-to-495 constituency and rapid transit the Boston to Salem constituency. They'll need that express inbound run and to skip the inner non-Chelsea stops...maybe with just that one CR-to-Blue transfer opportunity in Lynn. The express time probably lifts the capacity cap enough to support 50 years' worth of Peabody, Rockport, and Newburyport/Portsmouth growth curve at regular CR frequencies. But don't be holding out for a clock-facing schedule. That's not going to happen without similar money poured into the CR-only mode as it would take to build out the rapid transit mode. There's no reason to that with the stratospheric difference in ridership ROI.
Well, yes, it's certainly going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than Red-Blue, and we're certainly not getting a shot it until 2040 at the earliest.
I'd like to believe that, come 2040, we'll actually be able to get tunneling done - and, really, once you start the tunneling process, there's really no good argument not to go for the max-pain, get-it-all-done-now plan that couples Blue-Salem onto necessary Eastern Route fixes, because you're never going to get the go-ahead to come back and start a second painful tunnel build after your first job's finished and it turns out that whoops, our bad, we really needed 2+2 into our Taj Mahal Salem Station after all.
It's called the old Eastern Route ROW. Still intact as a power line ROW next to NH 236 between Kittery and North Berwick. I agree anything beyond Portsmouth CR is highly speculative. But if you're thinking of any future of real-deal HSR speeds to Portland, the Western Route isn't going to do that. It probably won't allow both electrification and double-stack freights (which are definitely happening before 2020 on Pan Am). And the curves around the Merrimack River, un-expandability of the ROW, and general congestion make it tough to push beyond 'fast diesel'. So IF there's a future for real 125+ to Portland, the Eastern Route is the only one that'll allow electrification and full freedom from freight congestion. It's almost arrow-straight from Chelsea to Portsmouth yard, and has relative paucity of grade crossings to zap on the segments that could top 125. If the Salem tunnel does become a half-bil project, HSR might be the only thing that ever justifies it.
Honestly, I think you're lowballing that tunnel in a huge way. I'd be amazed if we could get it done for less than $2B even.
That having been said, I honestly can't see the intact ROW you're talking about for the life of me. Believe me, I've looked... maybe I'm not looking hard enough and I'm going to feel real stupid if you have a map of it on hand, but I can't see any real way to get from
Kittery to
North or
South Berwick without going through a fairly significant amount of obstacles.
Not that I'm opposed to doing that if it comes down to it, mind you.
Again...only an "if there is ever to be real HSR to Portland" scenario, not a should there be or does it even matter before 2050. It's a dilemma forced by the likelihood that electrifying the Western Route over double-stack freights is a multi-billion retrofit that still won't net worthwhile speeds or congestion relief. Rebuilding that Kittery-North Berwick ROW, doing Salem if it hasn't already been done, and zapping the grade crossings in 125+ territory looks a lot better if that price point between Western and Eastern starts converging for real HSR. And only one is going to buy long stretches of real HSR.
If it comes down to one or the other, I'm just not seeing the argument for real HSR to Portland at great expense along the Western Route. Haverhill, Exeter, Durham/UNH and Dover together probably come close to the ridership potential of Portsmouth on its own, and one stop versus four isn't a very hard argument to make. Any other stops (Hampton? Newburyport?) just make the Eastern Route that much more lucrative, all the trains end up in North Station anyway and Anderson RTC is probably an acceptable loss in light of it being served by whatever NH Main services Amtrak wants to run and a Salem stop (for the actual destination) or a Beverly stop (for the 128 access). Absolutely no question whatsoever post-Rail Link, when the park-and-ride demands are all being fed by RTE and the entire line stretches down to New York or DC.
Um...yeah. They wanted that one in 1945 too:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ottomatic77/3304445209/sizes/l/in/photostream/. Few things:
-- The NH Main isn't going to have a need to jettison the local stops until it's hooked up to the N-S Link and throwing punishing levels of thru CR and intercity traffic out to Anderson at 125 MPH. The travel time to Lowell/Nashua making all intermediates is pretty good. It only needs a long-term plan to zap the West Medford grade crossing pair to leave its traffic capacity essentially unconstrained. If Lowell locals were augmented with a permanent re-splitting of the Reading Line from the Haverhill Line, and NHDOT expresses to Concord started...that pretty much does net a clock-facing Boston-128 schedule at Anderson with stuff stopping there every 15-25 minutes all day. So for now the CR mode's got a high growth ceiling at the stops that most matter that doesn't require DMU's or Fairmounting. Puts all manner of Blue and Orange extensions a bit higher on the priority pile.
-- However, when you do build the Link you'd absolutely want to consider whether it's worth trading in the local stops. 2 nonstop thru tracks where stuff gets to blast by at 90-125 MPH is going to work better than 3 tracks and dancin' crossovers of locals and expresses. Same considerations as the long-term wisdom of keeping any intermediates whatsoever on the NEC between BBY and 128 when Hyde Park is better served by Fairmount station's frequencies, rapid transit badly needs to displace the Needham Line, and Ruggles wouldn't exist at all if Dudley had any form of real rapid transit. Unlike the Worcester Line where Fairmounting's your only option for dense locals, there is a readily available rapid transit trajectory to clear out super-duper capacity on an intercity trunk.
-- You'd have to consider whether Green is the mode that should do this, or if it's worth unplugging the Medford Hillside GLX from the Central Subway and hooking it up to an available heavy rail line. I don't think this is an excuse to heavy-rail Green and all the billions that would entail. Stand at Northpoint and watch Orange go by all day long over on the other side of BET. You can fork off a branch right there. You can 2 x 2 RR/RT the Link, off Red at Columbia Jct. with two full-headway mains trading off at the "X". LRT'd Urban Ring is a much better use for the Green capacity that would free up than a full Anderson-via-Somerville branch that'll suck up 1-1/2 times the D's ridership and make it 1959 all over again for the other branches.
I maintain that heavy-rail Green is something that absolutely needs to be done eventually, and if we're going to jettison for anything, we jettison for that. The Link absolutely needs to be 4-tracks commuter/intercity rail with the amount of traffic I would anticipate coming through it, forking the Orange Line is a great way to screw over Sullivan and everything north of it, and the Blue Line isn't even a real choice. That really only leaves the Green Line (or some sort of ultra-wacky Mass Ave Subway double-back via Porter Square to jettison BOTH GLX branches, which is really almost too zany to even put to text.)
Riverbank Subway as an extension of Green Line Heavy Rail to keep the conversion from fouling over the many branches that would otherwise run through the Central Subway, alternatively, convert the subway and run LRT down the Riverbank as some kind of scenic touristy thing.
Otherwise, I would think that there's probably some way to balance the D and an Anderson Green Line Branch against each other to keep things from getting too messy through the Central Subway.
Didn't they look at the Orange Line branch alt and discard it awhile ago?
Really, forking the Orange Line is going to hurt traffic to Sullivan Square and everywhere north of it, which is kind of... bad.
