Idea for improving CR service on Newburyport/Rockport line, as well as warming up riders for a Danvers/Peabody branch and the Blue Line extension.
Phase 1:
Create more local short turns at Beverly, which also hit new stops at the proposed Blue Line stops running alongside the CR line (West Lynn, South Salem) This would be great for DMU service, but it isn't a neccesity.
Build double track up to the tunnel at Salem to allow for train meets.
Salem tunnel can't be double-tracked. It's too narrow. What you CAN do, and which they ruefully aren't doing with that over-budget car sink under construction in Salem, is double-tracking the platform. There is room to immediately double the second the tracks emerge from the portal. The station is much more a capacity choke point than the tunnel. It means only one train can occupy the entire stretch between Swampscott and Beverly with the single at high-use/high-dwell Salem making train meets nearly impossible to stage. The tunnel itself takes 2 minutes to clear. It essentially has to be 12 minutes of spacing on opposite-direction meets because the middle station of that stretch is single. Double-up the platform and everything except those 2 minutes in the tunnel are free for passing...smaller than the dwell time at the station. Pausing at the platform for a train to hit the tunnel is imperceptible on the schedule, and they could pack headways way denser.
Even better...if they build South Salem/Salem State U station at the south portal like the North Shore Transit Improvements study strongly recommends both ends of the tunnel have an on-platform dwell time control for staging meets through the tunnel with zero schedule drag. I firmly believe if they fix the single-platform constriction the line is fully equipped to handle all the headways they can possibly throw at it for Peabody, Portsmouth, and increased Rockport service. Assuming the other constrictions like the grade crossings and the sorry state of the movable bridges are taken care of.
Phase 2
Run the new local service out to Peabody and Danvers, which are both in need of service and provide great potential for 128 park and ride, as well as reverse commuting to downtown Peabody and the Northshore Mall. This line would hit all the previously implemented local stops.
Absolutely. Probably gonna have to wait for more money before they can build the new infrastructure to North Shore/Lahey Clinic, but if they wanted to spiff up the mainline today and just funnel the short-turns to a Peabody Sq. stub in the interim it wouldn't cost very much at all to rehab and signal such a short stretch of the active branch + build the separate Peabody platform at Salem station. It would help the bus connectivity immensely, which is why the phasing is attractive and probably would deliver the ridership.
Note: The Danvers branch is gone now. Trail has claimed it. So the twin branches or either/or branches originally scoped out in the study are no longer an option. It can only be Peabody/128 @ North Shore Mall, since that stretch of abandoned ROW is not trailed and has no plans to be trailed (no 95/1 crossing to connect to the trail on the other side, so it's moot). It's also a power line ROW so securing the easement isn't something a trail lobby could do by its lonesome.
Phase 3
Extend the Blue Line out to Lynn, and beef up the local trains to 20-30 minute headways. The "local" CR trains could alternate between ending at Danvers and Beverly, allowing for demand at the end to remain strong. A stop at Sullivan Square allowing for transfer to the Orange Line would be huge.
No on Sullivan. That's the highly constrained stretch of track shared by both Haverhill/Reading and all of the Eastern Route. A stop there destroys the capacity on both mainlines. And would even if you swapped the OL express track for an extra CR track. You don't need it either because Orange @ North Station is only 2 stops away. Have to concede that one as a permanent infrastructure constriction.
Basically you'd end up with a train (preferably DMU) going:
North Station
Sullivan Square
Chelsea (Hopefully beefed up to a legitimate stop with easier/better bus connections)
Lynn
West Lynn
Swampscott
South Salem
Salem
and then either
Peabody and Danvers (North Shore Mall/128), or Beverly Depot
Seems like a pretty solid schedule that would easily beef up service on the more populous parts of the line, as well as provide an easy outlet for Danvers/Peabody service, as well as being a better feeder for the Blue Line to Lynn. Would be nice to see DMU service to someday.
DMU's are not a good idea for the Eastern Route, and it's because of that Eastern + Western Route concurrency in Somerville. The need to load-balance through there means that DMU schedule density to Beverly or Peabody and need to maintain at-minimum current headways to Reading means Newburyport and Rockport will pay a headway penalty. It's the only way to make the traffic work through Somerville, and it flunks the do-no-harm test. Today Eastern Route trains must be granted priority through the junction in train meets because stopping and waiting for a Western Route train to pass does more schedule harm to Newburyport/Rockport than it does for Haverhill/Reading. The Western Route train is always the one asked to wait. DMU's push the conflicting movements to a point where even prioritized movements are not enough to prevent Newburyport/Rockport from getting kneecapped.
However...you CAN implement DMU's on the Western Route onlywithout creating similar strain provided all Haverhill thru trains get booted back to the Lowell Line and Reading reverts back to its pre-1979 status as a short-turn only line. Reading short-turn is near enough distance that Eastern Route getting 100% priority at meets in Somerville and the Reading DMU's having to pause every time at Mystic Jct. does no harm to any line's schedules. So you also have to consider...if picking northside DMU applications, where is it going to have biggest return on investment at most negligible strain on operations? That's Western Route...slam-dunk. I wouldn't even think twice about it given that it would substantially improve Reading ridership while still allowing every regular-CR growth slot the Eastern Route would need (if the crossings + decaying bridges + Salem squeeze were fixed yadda yadda. . .).
So have to concede this one as well. There is far more to gain by upping Newburyport/Rockport at regular CR frequencies and full 6-8 car bi-level consists to swallow up the ridership growth out to 495 than there is flooding the zone with DMU dinkys inside 128. Lines with that many current and potential branches just don't work well unless the branch schedules rule the mainline schedule. That's not a bad thing, because 3 potential branches at CR schedules is itself a substantial increase in mainline frequencies. All-day/clock-facing is the only thing you can't really have with branch schedules ruling...but it's still a train every few minutes at Salem and Beverly the hours of the day it counts most. This could work if they got the CR system Charlie'd and altered the fare structure Beverly-inbound to something a little more flat-fee and rapid transit-like. I'd suggest the same for the Lowell Line out to Anderson, as that's in a similar boat needing to let its future growth be ruled by 495-and-beyond CR schedules and not clock-facing DMU's...but where the sheer density of the potential CR schedule saturates the biggest inside-128 stops all the same.
The ONLY solution that's going to satiate demand for true rapid transit inside 128 on the North Shore is...true rapid transit. Lynn is too big a bus terminal too constrained by traffic to thru-route the entire North Shore's bus routes to Wonderland and downtown-via-Route 1. Letting the terminal act as a real transfer node to Blue suddenly makes every bus out there work vastly better and frees up the capacity to substantially expand the bus network and schedule density in Lynn, Saugus, Revere, Salem, Peabody, Marblehead, etc. That's why Blue's ridership projections are so freaking high out there. It makes the dense bus connections work right for the first time in history. DMU's don't because the bus capacity is still kneecapped by the traffic problems of thru-routing to Wonderland and beyond.
And as for Salem...Blue past Lynn is cheaper than getting Blue to Lynn. And produces similar ridership. They need to get their house in order and get to Lynn pronto, but the second Salem leg starts looking awfully inevitable +20 years after Lynn.
