Crazy Transit Pitches

[Shepard]

^ Sorry just realized I needed to make that mapsengine link public. Should work now.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Okay. Assuming the northern portion of the UR is built according to the Kenmore-Brookline Village "boomerang", the B is buried at least to St. Paul, the E is buried to Brigham and connected as a subway to the D, how horrifically impossible would a cut-cover from Brigham Circle to Roxbury Crossing under Tremont be? The building pilings would be an issue. The Mission Church obviously. Possibly draining issues being at a ridge on the slop of the Hill. Would it hugely more painful than the jog from Brigham to Brookline Village? It would be a ~3,000 ft tunnel with a portal somewhere at the western end of Malcolm X Blvd, which seems wide enough to hold a reservation if you're not afraid to cut a lane... from there you can street run to Dudley, join a Washington St streetcar line one stop to Melnea Cass and then split over that way.

The sub-Tremont tunnel would be this; Brigham-RoxX:

Ignore the streetcar line to the south and east out of Dudley...

Difficult. Not are-you-insane impossible like Brookline, but difficult. And kind of fugly operationally. Tremont's not that wide and there are places where the sidewalk is very narrow and front porches and building foundations are like 8 ft. from the curb. It would be a nightmare for "shit happens"/Copley-elevator-syndrome building impacts that would take a slow drip out of the project in constant mitigation. Plus it's a sharp curve at Brigham Circle so the only way you would be able to junction with a buried E in a tunnel is Copley Jct.-style at grade...no possibility of a flying junction here without blowing up half the circle.


It maybe doesn't hit all the density, but a way to do it on streetcar out of BV is to go down South Huntington on the Arborway Line (which, one would hope would continue as a surface branch splitting out at BV and back-tracking a block were the mainline E to be buried). Then fork at Heath Loop down Heath St. on surface trackage following the route of the 14 bus. Then air-rights it over the SW Corridor grade-separated to Roxbury Crossing and turn down wide Malcolm X Blvd. to Dudley. The 41 bus used to accomplish exactly this in its streetcar days, sharing the Arborway Line for a spell and then forking out to Dudley...albeit from JP Center/Centre St. instead of Heath. So it's not without precedent.

Avoids some traffic (Heath isn't that bad despite its narrowness), shares some track infrastructure on S. Huntington and Heath station, and has more grade separation than any other surface option with the SW Corridor jaunt and ability to reconfigure Malcolm X Blvd. with a bit more striped-lane traffic separation for transit vehicles.


Like I said, not a lot of good options if you want the dreamboat Phase III full tunnel. But there are some options if they want a "good enough" street-running to get to Dudley that isn't going to kill them on cost.

 

[cbrett]

If it wasnt for that stupid E branch, it would be a really interesting idea to take the blue extension in the riverbank and flip it with the green line, so that blue goes south to park at govt center and green goes west to MGH.
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Or maybe not build the riverbank at all, and route the blue down the central subway , going south along green tunnels, eventually tunneling under stuart to reach the E branch, and lengthening the e tunnel to allow for a proper HRT ROW.

The green would then split, either going towards south station under essex street instead of turning at Boylston, or tunnel under charles street where it would head north, connecting at MGH with the red then merging with the current green tunnel and head to North Station. GLX would be it's own line, also ending at north station.

Effectively it would connect the green branches to both North and South Station, and a green link between north and south station if desired. (Put a wye where the green splits at charles street)

 

[DominusNovus]

https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zDJ7PZTCibXk.kg-oClj1m5BQ

My latest map fleshing out my overlapping lines idea. It works best for Quincy (the only one I've done so far), which is close enough to Boston to be served by the main trunk, but large enough on its own to serve a hub for outlying lines (as well as being relatively close to some sizable municipalities on their own).

I'm presently brainstorming a similar layout with the Blue Line on the North Shore, with Wonderland being the southern terminus of the extension lines. The only problem is that everything's almost too close together. I could see three extensions: Peabody, Danvers, and Beverly. But once you get past those, which are all right next door, you've got a whole lot of nothing. With the South Shore, you can do a Brockton-Quincy route, and both cities have about 100k people each, and you can string things along between the two. The towns immediately surrounding Salem are all large in their own right, but not nearly as linear. Plus, it doesn't help Salem's depot is all sorts of constricted, isn't it?

As for Metro West, I was thinking about a line running from Framingham to maybe Reservoir as the furthest east for that (seems like a nice place for a terminal), and perhaps a perpendicular line, up towards Southboro and down towards Sherborn. But stuff is way too spaced out around there for me to really like it.

Quick questions:
- What the regulations about difference types of rail services sharing the same tracks?
- How much of the B (particularly past Packards Corner) and C lines could you bury without getting beyond crazy?
- How much would the B line be screwed up if it terminated at Reservoir instead of BC?
- How crazy would a Providence-Attleboro-Tauton-Fall River/New Bedford line be?

EDIT: I've made no distinction between DMU/EMU lines and 'proper' heavy rail mass transit.

 

[George_Apley]

https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zDJ7PZTCibXk.kg-oClj1m5BQ

My latest map fleshing out my overlapping lines idea. It works best for Quincy (the only one I've done so far), which is close enough to Boston to be served by the main trunk, but large enough on its own to serve a hub for outlying lines (as well as being relatively close to some sizable municipalities on their own).

Cool idea. I don't know how much Fenway, Andrew and North Quincy would work as terminals though. There's no stub tracks for them to be able to idle and reverse and still allow thru-trains to pass. I think Harvard could work if they use the old tunnel to Brattle Yard, but you'd need to extend the platform a good bit. Assembly might work too since it's a wide RoW. Also, you can't bring Orange from Forest Hills down the NEC to Dedham unless you bury it. Best way to get to Dedham is by doing a Red extension from Mattapan.

I'm presently brainstorming a similar layout with the Blue Line on the North Shore, with Wonderland being the southern terminus of the extension lines. The only problem is that everything's almost too close together. I could see three extensions: Peabody, Danvers, and Beverly. But once you get past those, which are all right next door, you've got a whole lot of nothing. With the South Shore, you can do a Brockton-Quincy route, and both cities have about 100k people each, and you can string things along between the two. The towns immediately surrounding Salem are all large in their own right, but not nearly as linear. Plus, it doesn't help Salem's depot is all sorts of constricted, isn't it?

Yeah you can't do anything with Salem Depot without completely tearing up historic downtown Salem. South Salem, and a non-connecting Salem stop just before the tunnel south of downtown is as far as you can get with rapid transit.

As for Metro West, I was thinking about a line running from Framingham to maybe Reservoir as the furthest east for that (seems like a nice place for a terminal), and perhaps a perpendicular line, up towards Southboro and down towards Sherborn. But stuff is way too spaced out around there for me to really like it.

Yeah anything beyond Framingham is Commuter Rail territory, not rapid transit. Framingham itself is a stretch, but given the concept you're going for, makes a certain amount of sense. Conceptually, any community that will have almost exclusively 9-5 commuters and empty trains between rush hours should be CR not RT.

- What the regulations about difference types of rail services sharing the same tracks?

F-Line will know more, but I don't think rapid transit (heavy rail/light rail) can share tracks with heavier commuter trains or freight trains. Especially anything using third rail. Even if it is legal in certain circumstances, the dispatch would be nightmarish...

- How much of the B (particularly past Packards Corner) and C lines could you bury without getting beyond crazy?

Packard's is as far as you'd go. Maybe Harvard Street.

C you could potentially go all the way, but why? It would be a waste. It functions far better than the B as it is, and with signal priority would work great.

- How much would the B line be screwed up if it terminated at Reservoir instead of BC?

Well you'd have to replace service to BC or get sued for loss of transit.

- How crazy would a Providence-Attleboro-Tauton-Fall River/New Bedford line be?

As Commuter Rail? Probably not that crazy, but also not studied. F-Line?

EDIT: I've made no distinction between DMU/EMU lines and 'proper' heavy rail mass transit.

I was wondering that. Assuming that all your "overlaps" with existing HRT/Potential Green HRT is traditional HRT, the Indigo lines would have to be DMU/EMU.

 

[DominusNovus]

Cool idea. I don't know how much Fenway, Andrew and North Quincy would work as terminals though. There's no stub tracks for them to be able to idle and reverse and still allow thru-trains to pass. I think Harvard could work if they use the old tunnel to Brattle Yard, but you'd need to extend the platform a good bit. Assembly might work too since it's a wide RoW. Also, you can't bring Orange from Forest Hills down the NEC to Dedham unless you bury it. Best way to get to Dedham is by doing a Red extension from Mattapan.

I used those terminals as fairly arbitrary, just to demonstrate the concept. Harvard, I picked because I knew there was some unused tunnel space. Everyone else, I just looked for a stop that seemed to have some open space around it that could be eminent domain'd. Ultimately, I was aiming for something that was relatively just past the urban core enough to save too many people from having to hop onto the counterpart line.

Packard's is as far as you'd go. Maybe Harvard Street.

Any particular reason? The ground's gotta be better than all the back bay muck, what with all the hills that route has.

I was wondering that. Assuming that all your "overlaps" with existing HRT/Potential Green HRT is traditional HRT, the Indigo lines would have to be DMU/EMU.

My basic philosophy is that I'm aiming more for the level of service, rather than the type of service. As long as the trains are showing up at regular intervals for a common fare, I don't care how they get from A to B.

 

[George_Apley]

Any particular reason? The ground's gotta be better than all the back bay muck, what with all the hills that route has.

It's not the muck but the hills themselves that are the problem. You're not going to get acceptable station depths and tunnel grades with all the height variation along Comm Ave.

My basic philosophy is that I'm aiming more for the level of service, rather than the type of service. As long as the trains are showing up at regular intervals for a common fare, I don't care how they get from A to B.

That's great for a hypothetical exercise, but we have to consider the actual type of service and how it gets there in order to achieve that level of service.

 

[omaja]

Any particular reason? The ground's gotta be better than all the back bay muck, what with all the hills that route has.

Assuming the goal would be to convert the buried segments to heavy rail, the main issue is exactly what you mention - the hills. You'd have some very deep stations at places like Washington Street where the grade from Warren would be far too steep of a climb for traditional subway cars. Certainly not impossible, just incredibly expensive.

Though I'm a huge proponent for upgrades to the Green Line, I don't think the B or the C sees anywhere near the volume which would necessitate full grade separation. If anything, though, elevating both would be a lot cheaper and achieve the same goal, not to mention the rights-of-way are more than wide enough to support elevated rail.

 

[George_Apley]

Assuming the goal would be to convert the buried segments to heavy rail, the main issue is exactly what you mention - the hills. You'd have some very deep stations at places like Washington Street where the grade from Warren would be far too steep of a climb for traditional subway cars. Certainly not impossible, just incredibly expensive.

Though I'm a huge proponent for upgrades to the Green Line, I don't think the B or the C sees anywhere near the volume which would necessitate full grade separation. If anything, though, elevating both would be a lot cheaper and achieve the same goal, not to mention the rights-of-way are more than wide enough to support elevated rail.

Don't the hills cause the exact same problem for elevated rail as they do for subway?

 

[Matthew]

The "B" struggles a lot with its passenger load, I think, but it definitely has a lot of room for improvement in simpler, cheaper ways without going the full "Crazy"

 

[George_Apley]

The "B" struggles a lot with its passenger load, I think, but it definitely has a lot of room for improvement in simpler, cheaper ways without going the full "Crazy"

Right. I feel that way about the whole Green Light Rail system. If it were upgraded (signal priority, CBTC signaling) and properly managed as a LRV system it could work great, especially with small doses of "crazy" here and there (bury B to Packards, E to Brookline Village) you could run it really smoothly and greatly expand the current branch network. Embrace Light Rail!

 

[DominusNovus]

Isn't there an underground river around NU that would play havok with burying the E line? Now, an elevated line, with a few coffee shops, bars, and other assorted student-orientated business built underneath (like they do in European cities)...

 

[George_Apley]

Isn't there an underground river around NU that would play havok with burying the E line? Now, an elevated line, with a few coffee shops, bars, and other assorted student-orientated business built underneath (like they do in European cities)...

The only reference to an underground river near NU that I can find in three minutes of googling is "traditional lore" regarding the underground routing of the Muddy, which of course, is above ground hundred yards to the west... I don't think the Muddy would "play havok" with a fairly shallow cut down the Huntington median (it can be shallow because there're no utilities directly under the RoW).

Elevated would work too.

 

[Downburst]

I don't know anything about an underground river, but I do recall being told in one of my classes a few years ago that there was some sort of fairly substantial water main/tank/pipe leak on NU's campus. However, it would cost far more to fix it than it would to just leave it be. This has lead to a high water table in parts of campus.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

If it wasnt for that stupid E branch, it would be a really interesting idea to take the blue extension in the riverbank and flip it with the green line, so that blue goes south to park at govt center and green goes west to MGH.
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Or maybe not build the riverbank at all, and route the blue down the central subway , going south along green tunnels, eventually tunneling under stuart to reach the E branch, and lengthening the e tunnel to allow for a proper HRT ROW.

The green would then split, either going towards south station under essex street instead of turning at Boylston, or tunnel under charles street where it would head north, connecting at MGH with the red then merging with the current green tunnel and head to North Station. GLX would be it's own line, also ending at north station.

Effectively it would connect the green branches to both North and South Station, and a green link between north and south station if desired. (Put a wye where the green splits at charles street)

The 1945 extension map pretty much does this with the Riverside-via-B&A line. Some of the more detailed plans showed a "Super Boylston" station reconfiguration. While it didn't say where the HRT trains would originate from from the idea was similar to when Orange Line trains temporarily used the Central Subway 1901-09 to connect the Charlestown and Washington Els while the Washington St. subway was built. Trolleys used the inner tracks of the 4-track portion and heavy rail used the outer tracks, with cross-platform transfers at Park. Only this time supposedly they would've fixed the 2-track squeeze to GC instead of making the trolleys loop from either end at Park and GC/Scollay with only heavy rail running thru. This way the D and the Needham branch with its grade crossings would've been trolley and more local-oriented while the B&A flank to Riverside would've been full load-bearing heavy rail. Also would've included a stop at present-day Back Bay and BU Bridge. No Kenmore, but it wouldn't exactly have been hard to position a Yawkey-like infill closer to Brookline Ave.

It easily could've been Blue since it interfaced with Scollay and they were already kicking around urban renewal ideas for blowing up the square...allowing substantial reconfiguration of the subways and none of those pesky historical impact concerns about a widened Tremont tunnel to Park digging up the colonial graveyards.


Kenmore was provisioned with a deep track pit on the B side of the platform when the station was built in 1932 as future-proofing for heavy rail using Blue cars. C trolleys would've continued to use the station while looping cross-platform...same setup as pre-rebuild Ashmont had and which Maverick had before the Blue Line Wonderland extension replaced all the Eastie/Revere streetcars that ran out of Maverick. But they didn't have a real firm idea of where a heavy rail line on/under the B would go, so it was less a formal plan than just future-proofing for a rainy day. This was about a dozen years after the perpetually-vaporware Riverbank subway was deleted from the official plans, and a dozen years before the '45 expansion plan with two-mode Riverside flanks and Boylston/Pleasant St. as the trajectory for hitting the B&A. In the 1920's-30's interim I think they were looking at a buried A-line out to Union Sq. and North Beacon St. meeting the B&A closer to the Newton town line and taking less track capacity. But back then pre-Depression the RR's were near peak-level power and the Riverside Line was one of the busiest commuter rail lines of all. So they were not really considering the D at all, and Boston & Albany would retain most of its capacity by still running Riverside Line commuter rail and keeping its remaining 2 mainline tracks in Newton for freight and intercity nonstops. The Depression was the first wave of crippling contraction in passenger RR traffic...then a plateau during wartime...then the fatal collapse right after. So the 1920's vs. mid-40's were totally different worlds re: the need for balancing subway capacity gains with RR capacity losses. Once that Back Bay routing opened up they had absolutely zero reason to consider Kenmore as a heavy rail trajectory any longer...and the D and Needham went on the table as complementary trolley lines.


So, no...if you consider that the in-between from the Riverbank's cancellation to onset of the Depression would've been studies before build, then the Depression would've put any builds on ice for a decade, then wartime materials shortages would've prevented a restart of a construction schedule, then the collapse of the RR's would've changed the game and put utmost priority on preserving all acquireable RR ROW's instead of tunneling on parallel routes...there was never a realistic chance of heavy rail conversion of the Central Subway surviving from late-20's proposal to mid-30's or early-40's build. Global shit happened way too fast in that chaotic 15 years and the world changed too completely to ever see that project all the way through even if they'd been hellbent on doing it. The Kenmore provision was just an itty-bitty snapshot in time that happened to get built in the in-between phase with funding committed and initial construction commencing pre-1929 collapse of the economy.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Quick questions:
- What the regulations about difference types of rail services sharing the same tracks?
- How much of the B (particularly past Packards Corner) and C lines could you bury without getting beyond crazy?
- How much would the B line be screwed up if it terminated at Reservoir instead of BC?
- How crazy would a Providence-Attleboro-Tauton-Fall River/New Bedford line be?

EDIT: I've made no distinction between DMU/EMU lines and 'proper' heavy rail mass transit.

They can't co-mingle. Rapid transit tunnels, even the most modern worldwide ones standardized at more-or-less Red dimensions, are too small to handle RR equipment. The curves on rapid transit are much sharper...even a fairly gentle one is too sharp for RR equipment on a ROW built for rapid transit. It's only those repurposed ex-RR surface ROW's that would work. RR's in the U.S. are capped at a maximum 2.2% climbing grade by U.S. law dating back to the 19th century because that's the most a single locomotive can pull a long freight or a dozen-plus passenger cars uphill without help. Every single incline on the subway is steeper than that, because trolleys and MU'd subway cars are much more nimble at climbing steep grades.

In short, to be considered a common-carrier RR it has to meet the minimum design standards for common-carrier RR equipment: minimum category of car size (i.e. single-level coach or boxcar/tanker/trailer height and width), turning radius of those minimum-standard car sizes and locomotives, and hauling capacity of standard motive power like max grades (there are regs about >x number of cars requiring more than 1 locomotive for safety purposes...mainly for freights many times longer than the very longest practical passenger train, but you still can't get certification as a common carrier without track design and clearances able to haul a 30 or so- car train with a single off-shelf loco). And there is nothing subway in this country that can do that.


It's done in some places around the world with EMU's and rapid transit cars. But those are in countries where there's nearly zero freight driving their crashworthiness standards for common-carrier RR's. Pacific Rim mostly. You could never even pull that off in Europe there's too much freight traffic. Let alone the U.S. even under a more flexible FRA. And the systems that do intermix not only have weak EMU's but also rapid transit cars that much more resemble EMU's in a subway than the weakly built tincans-on-wheels that run in every legacy U.S./Europe and new-installation metro subway. And their subways that do this are full-modern creations built at quasi-RR grades. You could never take an old prewar metro system--on any continent--and run even a flimsy EMU through it. They wouldn't fit. And a 10 MPH collision with a weak EMU would FUCK UP a Red Line car with fatalities or serious injury and total loss of the car.


The only way you can do it is with time separation like the RiverLINE. Which of course runs 100% on a RR ROW and not a rapid transit subway. If it were ever extended into a subway or purely rapid transit ROW the design standards would never allow the RR trains to follow it on the new ROW even under time separation...because it wouldn't be built (or need to be built) with common-carrier specs. I'm pretty sure the FRA wouldn't even approve all-new construction that co-mingles. It's strictly a grandfathering thing on legacy infrastructure. This would be true even if we were progressive and had Euro standards, because new construction is never allowed to compromise as much as retrofitted legacy. That's as true with road and building construction as it is with rail.


There are two U.S. metro systems that are FRA common carriers: PATH, and Staten Island Railway. But that is a legacy paper designation from over 100 years ago when Pennsylvania RR ran flimsy interurban-like cars into the PATH tubes off the NEC in New Jersey, and when SIR was fully-connected to the mainland and had time-separated freight like a lot of interurbans used to. Those operations were almost hilariously unsafe, 100% unregulated intermixings of half-wood interurban cars and steam trains that were merely lucky enough to not have any accidents. Wild west experimental era.

PATH and SIR only retain the paper designations because Penn RR continued to own and operate them long after the mainline separation went into effect, and because of the ownership the staff were all RR union. It stays that way because the RR union membership outlived the RR...PATH operators are still on their legacy contract because PATH is still isolated from any adjoining HRT systems like the MTA. And SIR is still an outlier from the rest of the MTA because it's Penn-era union contract is cushier than what the rest of the MTA subway is on. And it's such a small and lightly-staffed line that the MTA has no incentive to consolidate...it costs them less to keep a lean and isolated staff there than it does qualifying hordes of mainland operators to add Staten Island ops to their resumes. That's it. PATH keeps up its FRA status by having an intact connection to the NEC, even though no vehicle except a hi-rail pickup truck has ever crossed it in half a century. And SIR retains it by modding its stock MTA subway cars in barest cosmetic sense with RR-style grab bars and ghetto grilles on the operator windows. Which is really silly, but does meet some fine print on page 792 of the FRA rulebook that lets them be organizationally grandfathered under the time separation clause (time separation that is obviously...forever).

They can't practically ever reconnect back to the common-carrier networks because no RR equipment from the last 70 years (not even the flimsiest interoperable Asian EMU's) could fit in those ancient PATH tubes, and both PATH and SIR have fully differentiated to generic subway tincans. PATH's recently retired fleet literally the same as our Hawker-Siddeley Orange 01200 cars...like, literally you could drop a PA3 in revenue service on Orange and an 01200 in revenue service on PATH if they got modded to interact with the respective signal systems. And SIR is literally run on mainland subway cars transferred by boat and outfitted with the silly superfluous grab bars. They are also almost literally the same as our Red 01500/01600/01700 cars that would get the loss-of-life end of a collision with the world's lightest interoperable EMU's.

 

[Downburst]

Isn't there an underground river around NU that would play havok with burying the E line? Now, an elevated line, with a few coffee shops, bars, and other assorted student-orientated business built underneath (like they do in European cities)...

So, despite my previous answer, and in one of the better coincidences I've been a part of, one of my professors brought up the underground river under Northeastern today. That river is, in fact, Stony Brook.

From The Wikipedia Article on the subject:

Stony Brook was formerly a major watercourse in the city of Boston. It originates at Turtle Pond in the Stony Brook Reservation; it flows through Hyde Park, Roslindale, Jamaica Plain, and Roxbury. It formerly emptied into the Back Bay, a tidal part of the Charles River.
In the 18th century, water-powered industry grew up along it (including Pierpoint('s) Mill[1]) and it served as the sewer (excluding human waste) for the neighborhoods it ran through.
The Boston and Providence Railroad (now the Providence/Stoughton Line) was built along the valley of Stony Brook in 1834.
In the 19th century, many breweries and other industries grew up along Stony Brook.[2]
In the late 19th century, various parts of Stony Brook were converted into underground culverts or sewers. In around 1882, the Back Bay Fens were dredged to convert them into a holding basin for storm overflow from Stony Brook, following Olmsted's plan, and at around the same time its waters were diverted into an intercepting sewer near the current Ruggles Station.

F-Line, depending on the exact position of this sewer, do you think there might be any impacts to initiatives such as burying the E?

 

[George_Apley]

Difficult. Not are-you-insane impossible like Brookline, but difficult. And kind of fugly operationally. Tremont's not that wide and there are places where the sidewalk is very narrow and front porches and building foundations are like 8 ft. from the curb. It would be a nightmare for "shit happens"/Copley-elevator-syndrome building impacts that would take a slow drip out of the project in constant mitigation. Plus it's a sharp curve at Brigham Circle so the only way you would be able to junction with a buried E in a tunnel is Copley Jct.-style at grade...no possibility of a flying junction here without blowing up half the circle.

So, more trouble than it's worth.

It maybe doesn't hit all the density, but a way to do it on streetcar out of BV is to go down South Huntington on the Arborway Line (which, one would hope would continue as a surface branch splitting out at BV and back-tracking a block were the mainline E to be buried). Then fork at Heath Loop down Heath St. on surface trackage following the route of the 14 bus. Then air-rights it over the SW Corridor grade-separated to Roxbury Crossing and turn down wide Malcolm X Blvd. to Dudley. The 41 bus used to accomplish exactly this in its streetcar days, sharing the Arborway Line for a spell and then forking out to Dudley...albeit from JP Center/Centre St. instead of Heath. So it's not without precedent.

Avoids some traffic (Heath isn't that bad despite its narrowness), shares some track infrastructure on S. Huntington and Heath station, and has more grade separation than any other surface option with the SW Corridor jaunt and ability to reconfigure Malcolm X Blvd. with a bit more striped-lane traffic separation for transit vehicles.


Like I said, not a lot of good options if you want the dreamboat Phase III full tunnel. But there are some options if they want a "good enough" street-running to get to Dudley that isn't going to kill them on cost.

That's probably a decent option.

Also, where would the portal from a subway E be on South Huntington? If it's buried under the Fens to BV would there be an underground junction or would JP-bound trains split to the surface somewhere after Brigham while the subway continues to BV?

 

[DominusNovus]

So, despite my previous answer, and in one of the better coincidences I've been a part of, one of my professors brought up the underground river under Northeastern today. That river is, in fact, Stony Brook.

From The Wikipedia Article on the subject:

I knew it! Thanks for the confirmation. My understanding is that it runs, more or less, underneath Forsyth st., which is the reason why the tunnel system on campus only runs on the eastern side of campus.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

That's probably a decent option.

Also, where would the portal from a subway E be on South Huntington? If it's buried under the Fens to BV would there be an underground junction or would JP-bound trains split to the surface somewhere after Brigham while the subway continues to BV?

It probably wouldn't be on South Huntington, because that's an even more constrained intersection than Brigham Circle that would have to be another crappy Copley Jct. setup. Plus probably a little property taking on that first S. Huntington block because there's so little running space for an incline + portal from underneath the intersection.

More than likely it spits out at BV with a bi-directional wye at a reconfigured Reservoir-like station. Reservoir, BTW, has unused platforms for the C/Chestnut Hill Ave. side and rare short-turns. And used to, in the 70's, semi-flyover configuration to street level before they altered the track layout for pedestrian improvements. So if BV became sort of a full-time superstation in that mode the Heath/Forest Hills trains would probably backtrack down Pearl St. to South Huntington. Probably by splitting between these buildings and taking River Rd. to meet Huntington instead of fighting through the Brookline Ave. traffic light. Or at least that's the most logical way to do it if building a D-to-E connector today. It would also save a shitload of money to do one portal and be a ton easier operationally to spit out and divide tracks at a platform Kenmore-style rather than a stop signal at an at-grade underground junction.


So it's like +2 blocks of street-running and 2 sets of traffic lights to get backwards to South Huntington. But who cares because you skip ALL the other lights and street-running on today's Huntington E for a massive overall time and congestion savings via the tunnel. That's where you get the capacity to fork the lines at Heath without overload, even with the little backtrack move from BV. You'd never be able to do that on South Huntington today.


Hell, if they built the D-to-E connector today bi-directional they could run these service patterns today after Sox games to distribute the crowds the hell away from Kenmore. Loop 'em down the E to downtown and send a few out to Heath to 'em the hell away from Fenway. Doesn't matter if the BV platform on this little connector is just an ADA curbside bus stop on Pearl next to the main station in lieu of touching the main station. It achieves the whole perceived advantages of running such a cheapie connector in revenue service today...Kenmore-Huntington, and Huntington-Reservoir or something to double-up E service on the heaviest-ridership portion during peak hours. If they ever build the tunnel...you use the same surface connection as always, just repurposed in as-is condition as a part of a linear Forest Hills (or FH-plus) branch instead of as a part-time alt route.