Crazy Transit Pitches

If you want Boylston st to be carless then just propose it be carless. Why make a new transit line on its surface when there already is one... Right underground?
 
Shepard said:
If you want Boylston st to be carless then just propose it be carless. Why make a new transit line on its surface when there already is one... Right underground?
Click to expand...

How about a street car line up and down Boylston to mirror the underground tracks?

Market Street in San Francisco does this with its Market Street Tunnel. It's five layers of transit on top of each other (BART, MUNI Subway, Road, Bus, Market Street Subway).

It could be a toursty thing like it is in SF.

Just a thought.
 
But the Market St streetcar serves multiple purposes: it connects the CBD with Fisherman's Wharf (tourists) but also acts as a surface line that makes more frequent stops than the subways. This works in the CBD but it wouldn't work for the Back Bay. The only analog for Boston would be a SBW to North Station (or Charlestown) streetcar that runs along the Greenway. Running streetcars through the Back Bay is just a waste of money.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
But the Market St streetcar serves multiple purposes: it connects the CBD with Fisherman's Wharf (tourists) but also acts as a surface line that makes more frequent stops than the subways. This works in the CBD but it wouldn't work for the Back Bay. The only analog for Boston would be a SBW to North Station (or Charlestown) streetcar that runs along the Greenway. Running streetcars through the Back Bay is just a waste of money.
Click to expand...

I disagree. First off, we're in crazy transit pitches thread, so money is no object and ideas in this thread are a little off the beam.

As a frequent visitor (and have many friends who live in SF who tell me this), I can tell you Market Street streetcar is only for tourists. Same can be said for the cable cars. No locals ride those routes (okay some do, but most don't). There are also buses that use the same stops on Market Street and the locals use those more. But most locals despise the F Market because of the tourists and won't use it usually.

You could also connect the streetcar line to the B line for a much longer streetcar route (via Boylston/MassAve/Newbury/Comm. You could still keep the portal from B -> Kenmore, but some how connect the surface tracks to the B line after the portal on Comm Ave. Same on the Boylston Station side. Re-open the portals that exist on between Arlington and Boylston next to the public garden.

Then the subway becomes "express" and the streetcar along boylston becomes "local". (and street tracks would give an alternative when the subway below has issues)

Just a thought.

PS - I do like the idea of a trolley line along the greenway however, I always envisioned that as a looping point for express buses from the 'burbs', but then again since this is the crazy transit pitches thread.. why not both? :)
 
Last edited:
I have this idea for sets of 6 to 8-car paired D(or e)MU trains replacing the locomotives on the Commuter Rail but this plan allows for commuter branches, in that before the junction, the train stops, and the last two cars on the set disengage from the rest of the train. this now 4-6 car "mothership" train continues on along the mainline while the 2-car branch train, pauses for the switch momentarily and then proceeds along the branch line.

I'm not entirely sure how this would work out on the inbound trips.

Example:
8-car Framingham Local
at Auburndale, "mothership" train disconnects from the last two cars and proceeds down mainline to Framingham, while 2-car dinky branches off to Riverside station
 
Coupling and uncoupling is slow - you lose about ten minutes which makes for a pretty unpalatable delay.
 
They do that in Europe for commuter rail, but only in a very narrow sets of circumstances:

-- It's a very light-use branchline.
-- The light-use branchline must have a one-seat to the [city/CBD/major terminal/other] instead of an outer transfer, or else the ridership would be too light to run the branch at all.
-- The light-use branchline would be too expensive for its ridership to run as an extra mainline schedule slot that simply peels off on the branch.
-- There's no other way to consolidate service other than an ops-fugly maneuver like de-coupling. For example, when the light-ridership branchline is a law-mandated rail service that cannot legally be cut from the schedule, or substituted with a transfer + connecting train or bus.

These aren't profitable routes that this practice serves, but more small-town accessibility that wouldn't justify any rail transit whatsoever by other scheduling means. Strictly a practice of last resort when nothing else fits the bill or the law takes a firm stand on whose service has ironclad protection against cuts. In all other cases it's avoided because it's so ops ham-fisted. For the reasons EGE cited with dwell penalties, and also because it puts additional wear on the MU equipment. All it takes is a glitchy electronics connection that makes a freshly coupled consist "reboot" (like the Green Line frequently does) and you've got several minutes' extra delay backing up the mainline while the crew has to run through their troubleshooting checklist to isolate and fix the glitch. That's fine when off-the-clock inside the yard and you can just grab a different empty trainset if there's a stubborn fault with the MU'ing connection. But it's a real P.I.T.A. to have to deal with that at a station stop with passengers onboard. And parts wear out, so the glitches will happen more frequently if sets are torn apart and mashed together all day every day in higher stress situations like middle of a revenue run.

So theory doesn't match up with ops reality. Not even in the countries that run circles around us on both quality of equipment and nimbleness of ops.




The most 'recent' instance (i.e. post-steam era) where this practice was ever done in Boston was 1967 when the Needham and Millis Lines ran as a 2-car RDC set South Station-Needham Jct. then were uncoupled/recoupled at Junction for single cars to diverge to or from the branching destinations. But that was a way, way different era. NYNH&H was still the private operator with MBTA only existing to cut them a subsidy check to retain mandatory in-district CR service. So the "this is law-mandated and we don't have permission to discontinue, otherwise we would have long ago" scenario described above was in effect. For a few years in the mid-60's only. And Millis was only 1 rush-hour trip per day in the A.M. commute direction, 1 rush-hour trip per day in the P.M. commute direction while Needham ran more regularly. So there was only 1 actual coupling and 1 actual uncoupling per day. It wasn't a regular practice in the Budd era.

Just like today, if you have to branch it's way easier to just run an additional mainline frequency. And the same would be true if they adopted xMU's, just like it's true for Europe. Because of the evaporation of freight in New England there pretty much are no minor branchlines left that would even be the slightest candidate for something like this. Every expansion proposal ever studied has warranted additional mainline frequencies for doing the branching, and so have 95% of the more far-out pitches. That's just how the route network we have to work with in New England--both active tracks and protected landbanked ROW's--is laid out.
 
Last edited:
SF MUNI practices revenue-service coupling/uncoupling for the Third Street line, because it can only accommodate one-car trains. But the 4th and King Street Caltrain station is on the way to Third Street, and has heavy commuter flows in the peak hour, really needing the two cars. Or at least so I recall from when I rode it a few years ago.

I seem to recall some Japanese examples as well. But that's not surprising. They don't mess around with slow and sloppy operating practices like we do.
 
Waaaaay back in the day, there was a truly crazy transit operation with splitting trains. Uniquely among the 8 major railroads running into Boston by the 1880s, the Old Colony (as it does now) had to balance multiple trunk routes on a single mainline into Boston, all of which had their own branch lines as well. This was before their mainline was fully quad-tracked and before South Station, so they were pretty tight on capacity.

They did indeed pick up and drop cars (dedicated engines stayed on the branchlines) at junctions. But outbound trains would also drop cars at speed when the mainline train didn't need to stop at the junction, thus leaving the brakeman in the dropped cars to apply the brakes to stop at the station.

Unsurprisingly, this was a Bad Idea. In 1883, a misjudged 'flying switch' operation led to the dropped cars approaching a Mattapan Branch engine too fast. The engineers jumped, and the engine (possibly with the passenger cars attached) ran to Mattapan without anyone in the cab. It crashed into standing freight cars, amazingly with no casualties.
 
The EGE said:
Unsurprisingly, this was a Bad Idea. In 1883, a misjudged 'flying switch' operation led to the dropped cars approaching a Mattapan Branch engine too fast. The engineers jumped, and the engine (possibly with the passenger cars attached) ran to Mattapan without anyone in the cab. It crashed into standing freight cars, amazingly with no casualties.
Click to expand...

Can you imagine ESPN's Not Top Ten covering that? That would be hilarious.
 
Matthew said:
SF MUNI practices revenue-service coupling/uncoupling for the Third Street line, because it can only accommodate one-car trains. But the 4th and King Street Caltrain station is on the way to Third Street, and has heavy commuter flows in the peak hour, really needing the two cars. Or at least so I recall from when I rode it a few years ago.

I seem to recall some Japanese examples as well. But that's not surprising. They don't mess around with slow and sloppy operating practices like we do.
Click to expand...

Yes, there are several branching operations that do this as a ridership aggregation service without unnecessarily complicating schedules on the main line with lots of small trains.

The Sunrise Izumo night train is an example of a more mainline service that runs EMUs that splits/combines incredibly quickly - the split into the 2 7-car trainsets at Okayama happens so fast that this YouTube personality in Japan doesn't have enough time to even pop out and visit a vending machine on the platform.

If somehow we could gain exception from FRA operating rules (now I want to study rail labour safety in Japan...), I could see this as a good compliment to full build of NSRL. For midday and evening branch service, running 'rail bus' type operations to the main lines and aggregating the trains to maintain frequencies on the branches while not running absurdly short trains on the main lines running through downtown. We've said many words about how ops would have to change if NSRL ever became a thing, but remind me again; is TPH a concern and would branching - again, assuming some sort of passenger ops branching or total overhaul of FRA operating rules - solve any capacity and frequency problems?
 
This does happen on Amtrak, BTW, with the separate halves of the Lake Shore Limited. With a practice instituted entirely within the modern era--1975--since the LSL never existed in the private RR era at any rough facsimile to the way it operates now. Boston section pulls in headed by a diesel and usually carrying the cafe car for use by everyone Albany-Chicago. New York section pulls in headed by a dual-mode and usually carrying the dining car for use by everyone Albany-Chicago. Dual-mode locomotive separates off and heads to the yard, Boston consist maneuvers in and couples. The opposite happens on the trip home.


But that's waaaaaaay different with coach trailers than it is with MU's. A coach only has a 'dumb' connection of straight electricity for the lights/HVAC/wall outlets and a very simple pass-thru data connection for the PA/door controls/emergency telecoms/etc. Trailers not only don't fault often, but when they do the crew can just do what they do on commuter rail and run a single car in the dark or move passengers to a different car and isolate it. The Lake Shore Limited doesn't even run push-pull--it's pull-only with no cab car--so it doesn't even risk the most common kind of commuter rail car fault: wonky connection to the cab car's controls when changing ends. Amtrak also has the added advantage of its big Empire Division home yard being 200 paces in eyesight of the A-R platforms and having large onsite staff of maint techs, plus rescue trainsets onhand if the LSL has a problem and everyone needs to change trains. They wouldn't risk splitting that train at all if it had to run with a cab car and didn't have a big maintenance HQ right there.


Any MU's, including subway cars and trolleys, have much more complex data connections. Multiple units have 2-way communication between all cars for balancing out individual cars' propulsion, so an unnsecured cable from a bad coupling is going to cause faults galore and leave a train dead in the water. That's what gets every operator risk-averse to doing it at all unless there's zero alternative (like Matthew's MUNI example). Bang trainsets together in the field enough times and the connections start to wear out. We see that all the time on the Green Line, where trainsets get split up and recombined in the yard more often any other mode in Boston. The Type 7's that have yet to go through midlife overhaul are glitchy as hell, with the 'reboot' epidemic being the end result of worn-out connectors causing MU'ing faults. Oldest Red and Orange cars also fault enough that they take great pains to keep trainsets together as much as humanly possible. As do some of Metro North's and NJ Transit's most ancient EMU's. It's one thing to have gradual wear-and-tear causing faults in the yard, and another at a station stop with passengers onboard...miles from a maintenance base under time crunch to keep schedule. The extra overhead it takes onsite to be fail-safe just ends up lathering on too much extra cost and OTP penalty. So nobody, including the first-worlders, does it except in those very limited no-alternative scenarios.

Certainly nobody dreams up new installations of split-and-combine ops if they can avoid it. And here at least there's always a crying need to backstop mainline frequencies with extra trains--even if they're expresses--so doing something branch-centric passes up too many easy-grab extra frequencies to ever be worth a consideration.



For this Auburndale example, one of the things Indigo accomplishes is cleaning up the increasing glut of inside-128 stops that bog down the Worcester schedule and over-fills the trains. Worcester's schedule could improve a lot if it didn't have to serve Newton and Allston once every couple of trips to feed those stops with some baseline of service. They aren't MetroWest or past-495 reverse commute destinations. So I could see in an Indigo world 80% or more of Worcester-proper trains skipping Auburndale-Yawkey entirely for sake of keeping the Worcester trip closer to an hour. And then Framingham locals consolidating Newton to just Newton Corner with its superior bus connections, and a pick-'em of 1 or 2 of the Yawkey-West-New Balance trio--perhaps a rotating cast in different schedule slots--to give Allston and the campuses baseline representation. Then let Indigo handle the whole inside-128 string exclusively.

Extra mainline frequencies accomplishing the service goals for each distinct audience and each distinct audience's demand profile: inside-128, MetroWest, past-495...and where each of those groups of commuters need to go in the largest numbers at the most tolerable travel times. Not a situation where uncoupling accomplishes anything because it drags down an outside-128 schedule that badly needs some semi-expressing to keep good time.

Survey any current or potential commuter rail line in all 6 New England states and you'll find the same thing: the extra mainline frequencies are just too valuable to pass up when you've got an opportunity to grab extra slots or balance the needs of different audiences that traverse the mainline. I actually can't think of any applications on the whole Eastern seaboard where splitting even asks the right demand questions. Maybe somewhere in the Midwest or Mountain West there's a fit, but it's pretty cut-and-dried what the needs are East Coast and West Coast whether we're running a first-world Euro style network or just more of the same.
 
Last edited:
And the Amtrak trains that are split/joined are scheduled for rather long station stops in Albany-Rensselaer (Lake Shore Limited), San Antonio (Sunset Limited/Texas Eagle), and Spokane (Empire Builder).

Amtrak tested a trainset in the 1990s - I want to say it was the Flexliner, a Danish-built train that is or was in service in Denmark and Israel - that was designed to easily split. How it would have been viewed by the FRA, however, is another question entirely.
 
Matthew said:
I seem to recall some Japanese examples as well. But that's not surprising. They don't mess around with slow and sloppy operating practices like we do.
Click to expand...

Took a train from Matsumoto to Narai, Japan that did this at Shiojiri. We had to be on the last two cars as the rest of the train split decoupled. It took about 5 minutes (if that). It really wasn't a big process.
 
DigitalSciGuy said:
If somehow we could gain exception from FRA operating rules (now I want to study rail labour safety in Japan...), I could see this as a good compliment to full build of NSRL. For midday and evening branch service, running 'rail bus' type operations to the main lines and aggregating the trains to maintain frequencies on the branches while not running absurdly short trains on the main lines running through downtown. We've said many words about how ops would have to change if NSRL ever became a thing, but remind me again; is TPH a concern and would branching - again, assuming some sort of passenger ops branching or total overhaul of FRA operating rules - solve any capacity and frequency problems?
Click to expand...

NSRL probably wouldn't work for that because it isn't outright replacing the surface terminals. It doesn't have that much capacity because its incredible steepness keeps even the most nimble of EMU's running slow single-file through each of the 2 NB, 2 SB tracks of the Link and the underground junctions. With less overall throughput and slower trip if Central Station gets built and takes any significant chunk of the schedule. The Link definitely blows the lid of capacity on every mainline because the terminal capacity is the ultimate limiter to how close you can pack the trains anywhere fanning out. So northside and southside each having a Terminal A and Terminal B option is where all the gains happen. NEC, B&A, Old Colony, Eastern Route, NH Main, Midland (Fairmount/Franklin), Fitchburg Main: all of them can have service density shooting to the moon if the start of the northside or southside terminal districts and great mash-together of all lines gives each of them 2 routes to divvy up and manage the mash-up. The only lines still limited by non-terminal track capacity are: the outside-128 branches still governed in part by their parent mainlines' track capacity (though the branch service density shoots through the moon too), the partially single-track inner Western Route, and perennial NEC odd-man-out Needham. The latter two in a NSRL universe probably (at long last) being expunged from commuter rail entirely and converted to Orange Line extensions so there's no also-rans dragging up the rear of the supersized CR system and depriving some dense inside-128 destinations of the frequent service everyone else gets to enjoy. It's most definitely not a substitute for rapid transit; if anything it majorly heightens the urgency to finish the ambitious 1945 expansion plan.


So it's not a SEPTA thing where the surface terminals are being 1:1 swapped for a thru-running tunnel. You'll have 2 final terminal approaches--each with finite capacity--to choose from. And if you want to wring the tippy-toppiest capacity out of each mainline to scale to each and every demand profile--inside-128, 128-to-495, past-495, regional intercity, and Amtrak/long-haul--you're still going to be bullseyeing the fattest targets and not throwing the kitchen sink's worth of niche services down the tunnels, through the North Station drawbridges, and through Cove interlocking. Indigo operations, most definitely...super-small xMU's or railbus thingies, no. If anything those Indigo trains are going to be swelling well beyond married-pair or married-triplet single xMU's and start running as 2- or 3-car lash-ups most hours of the day with Blue/Orange-approximate seating capacity. Slots are still too valuable to waste on a railbus.


And the tunnel routes are going to get prioritized to highest-demand destination pairs that match up well with points on the compass and hit the polar opposite, hardest-to-reach points on 128 and 495. Whether it's an Indigo, a 495 local, or a semi-express regional. You'd be talking NEC-to-NH Main, B&A-to-Eastern Route, Old Colony-to-Fitchburg as likely primaries. And then a B-set of compass pairs like North Shore-South Shore (Old Colony to Eastern), Midland to NH Main, Stoughton/South Coast main to Fitchburg to keep the north vs. south mismatch in # of mainlines balanced. The wacky "everywhere-to-everywhere! Needham to Fitchburg! Rockport to Foxboro! Greenbush to Haverhill!" blurred concepts and cool animated GIF maps they were showing in the initial NSRL presentations are nonsense. They don't take into account that the surface terminals are not only staying but still uber-important, with coherent organization and prioritization still the only way the system will fire on all cylinders. So the tunnel pairs need to be rationed to high-demand routes and more or less set pairs to wring maximum value out of the thing. If you need to do a low-demand pairing like Needham to Rockport that's what the easy upstairs/downstairs transfer on a single ticket is for. They're not going to deprive somebody of a higher-demand straight-line trip from the Woburn office parks to the Westwood office parks for the sake of 'parity' for the dozen people who really need to get from posh Hingham to gritty Lawrence this afternoon.
 
Lrfox said:
Took a train from Matsumoto to Narai, Japan that did this at Shiojiri. We had to be on the last two cars as the rest of the train split decoupled. It took about 5 minutes (if that). It really wasn't a big process.
Click to expand...

Sounds about right. The kind of layover they have in Albany for the LSL is nothing but schedule padding for two halves of a route with generally shitty OTP. A lash-up of nuthin' but Amtrak blind trailers can easily be done reliably inside of 5 minutes.


Doing it with MU's of any sort--including HRT subway or trolleys--still has the unsolvable problem of an inherently more complicated trainlining connection that can fault if something jars loose on a coupling or uncoupling. And the higher operating and maintenance overhead of doing that far out in the field and voluntarily putting more wear on the connections with constant splits and recombines. That's not first-world practices vs. some FRA-strangled backwater, Japan vs. Euro vs. U.S., well-maintained equipment vs. past-its-prime equipment. Even a brand new cable is going to once every X times fail to snap together properly on a coupling or jar another car's cable loose on a decoupling...then force a delay while the crew runs through its troubleshooting checklist. With that "once every X times" coming due more often the more widespread a practice it is. It's the operating hazard you incur by adopting that practice, and everyone around the world has to deal with it biting them in the butt occasionally.

It's a cost/benefit ratio like everything in life. In Japan they find the benefits outweigh the risks on certain lines. In Europe they find the same on a far more limited set of services. And in general both continents avoid it outside of the specific criteria where it pays off, because it's more trouble than it's worth on other services. As for the U.S...it's not that it can't be an adopted practice, but more that there just aren't many candidate lines--definitely not East--where it's a fit. Nearly every mainline needs the extra frequencies bad enough to give branch schedules their biggest bang-for-buck run as extra mainline local or express slots...not as splits. There's no U.S. specific reason it breaks out that way; it's just coincidentally how the needs short-term to very deep long-term happen to line up. So coupling/decoupling ends up an answer in search of a question the demand profile...likewise coincidentally...isn't asking anywhere within a half-dozen states of Massachusetts.
 
EricS said:
Amtrak tested a trainset in the 1990s - I want to say it was the Flexliner, a Danish-built train that is or was in service in Denmark and Israel - that was designed to easily split. How it would have been viewed by the FRA, however, is another question entirely.
Click to expand...


Fucckkk...I feel like I have insider info for once. That's the IC3 - I've taken them for years. The DSB has and is still having it's own Breda-moment trying to replace the IC3s: DSB was undergoing a corporate restructuring and ensuing investor issues yet managed to order an overcomplicated (for Breda at least) next generation, there were AC issues, coupling issues, electronics issue - the most bizarre episode was, however, when one of the Danish trainsets ended up in Libya as a gift from Berlusconi to Qaddafi (when he was still a thing). A new government put the screws to DSB who put the screws to Breda and threatened to cancel the contract sans payment.

Anyways, the IC3s have had to stick around and fill in for touchy, new IC4s - they occasionally split (traveling to/from Copenhagen) around Fredericia (middle of the peninsula, split for north and south/west service), delay takes anywhere from 5-10 minutes but it's a decently trafficked stopped so it's not particularly painful and DSB is phasing it out for the main intercity routes. The Øresundstoget uses a modified version on the most trafficked single line in the country. Trains are nice to ride in too, nothing special but comfortable, but I doubt they'd pass grade with the FRA.
 
How did Qaddafi end up with a piece of hardware like the IC4 when his country has no railways whatsoever? Was it just the world's most expensive cardboard mockup for the vaporware HSR network he was promising the masses but had no practical means of building?


Don't get me wrong...the fact that it was Qaddafi makes plausibility directly proportional to batshittery if that was indeed the case. I'd even believe it if he bought a fuckin' Maglev train on credit just to run it in circles on one of his palace grounds.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
How did Qaddafi end up with a piece of hardware like the IC4 when his country has no railways whatsoever? Was it just the world's most expensive cardboard mockup for the vaporware HSR network he was promising the masses but had no practical means of building?
Click to expand...

Something something colonialism something something 40 year anniversary gift. The first pictures popped up in a Germany news source - DSB thought it was a fabrication at first and ignored it. A few engineering sites in Denmark picked it up from there and DSB responded second round a question that it was most likely a showpiece mock-up. Not too long after the German and Danish sites that covered the story received some interior pics to discover that not only was it a fully-functional IC4 set that, by all basic, well-respected contractual understanding, belonged to Denmark, it had also received an interior upgrade with new carpeting, white sofas installed, and all the other luxury ephemera that dictators like. Apparently, Berlusconi "bought" the train from AnsaldoBreda, shipped it to Libya (where as far I know it was never in service anywhere at any time) to commemorate 40 years worth Qaddafi, and was somehow construed as a gesture of friendship in the running "you owe me shit for colonialism" schtick that Moammar liked so much. I don't know, it was just one supremely bizarre moment amongst a litany of DSB over-asks and Breda failures to comply.

If the two major players are hubristic and batshit insane supertwins like Silvio and Mo then I'm not sure anything can be realistically ruled out. I mean a fucking next generation high speed trainset ended up in Libya without anyone notifying the goddamn agency that 'owned' it.

The whole sage became and continues to be a pain-in-the-ass for DSB, they're in the midst of rolling out the Femernbælts tunnel, which requires electrification of the remaining regional rail lacking the correct infra (Denmark backed the diesel horse), building a new line to shear some distance of the approach to Copenhagen to the Femern crossing, trying to get the four big cities onto a new 1 hour-between-major-hubs timetable, trying to paper over the lack of trainsets the intercities and figure out how to replace the 13 ICE DMU sets that DB just announced would be pulled out of København-Hamborg service - it's a major reinvestment in the national system, but you couldn't have asked for a worse PR crisis like a pimped out IC4 crash landing in fucking Libya, to kick off the whole 15 year plan.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top