Crazy Transit Pitches

Diesel commuter rail trains are loud. Getting rid of that noise would probably please the NIMBYS.

The biggest downside is the fact that more trees would need to be cut.

There was plenty of bitching about mass tree trimming during the PTC installation these past 2 years, but the property lines are inclusive of the tree buffers so there's a whole lotta nuthin' any NIMBY's can do about it. Trees used to be trimmed way, way further back from the tracks than they are today back when steam engines were upchucking fire-starting sparks into the air, so the property lines around our mainlines are what they are not for the noise-muffling tree berm but because they used to be clear-cut dozens of feet back to the literal property line so the act of running trains didn't burn everything down around it.

Also...there's a reason why our mainlines spend so much time in running through wetlands instead of unbroken wall-to-wall density soon after leaving town. Back in the early-1830's when most of the big trunk mains were laid out enough of our Puritan ancestors thought smoke-belching mechanized transport was the work of the Devil that the RR's over-tried to avoid all the built-up town centers of the era...for example, why the Lowell Line--the first of the big mains to be built--avoids Stoneham and Woburn Center like the plague. Or why the first incarnation of the B&M Western Route completely bypassed Lawrence on a straight Andover-North Andover cut that ran about a mile east of current Ballardvale/Andover and I-495, until they abandoned-and-rebuilt it inland on the current alignment about 30 years later. Those NIMBY's could burn you at the stake if you angried them up too much. >2 towns out most of the density pockets on the RR's were created by the existence of the RR displacing the older density pockets that weren't on transportation, and you still have large tracts of each main passing through wetlands between destinations as legacy of that earliest-most game of keep-away.


It's not like stringing up wires is going to be contiguously visually impactful as if this is the New Haven Line or something. There are lots of density breaks and abundance of natural & vegetative buffering on each of our CR lines because of those legacies: both the not-starting-unintentional-fires and the burn-the-wicked-witch variety.
 
There was plenty of bitching about mass tree trimming during the PTC installation these past 2 years, but the property lines are inclusive of the tree buffers so there's a whole lotta nuthin' any NIMBY's can do about it. Trees used to be trimmed way, way further back from the tracks than they are today back when steam engines were upchucking fire-starting sparks into the air, so the property lines around our mainlines are what they are not for the noise-muffling tree berm but because they used to be clear-cut dozens of feet back to the literal property line so the act of running trains didn't burn everything down around it.

Also...there's a reason why our mainlines spend so much time in running through wetlands instead of unbroken wall-to-wall density soon after leaving town. Back in the early-1830's when most of the big trunk mains were laid out enough of our Puritan ancestors thought smoke-belching mechanized transport was the work of the Devil that the RR's over-tried to avoid all the built-up town centers of the era...for example, why the Lowell Line--the first of the big mains to be built--avoids Stoneham and Woburn Center like the plague. Or why the first incarnation of the B&M Western Route completely bypassed Lawrence on a straight Andover-North Andover cut that ran about a mile east of current Ballardvale/Andover and I-495, until they abandoned-and-rebuilt it inland on the current alignment about 30 years later. Those NIMBY's could burn you at the stake if you angried them up too much. >2 towns out most of the density pockets on the RR's were created by the existence of the RR displacing the older density pockets that weren't on transportation, and you still have large tracts of each main passing through wetlands between destinations as legacy of that earliest-most game of keep-away.


It's not like stringing up wires is going to be contiguously visually impactful as if this is the New Haven Line or something. There are lots of density breaks and abundance of natural & vegetative buffering on each of our CR lines because of those legacies: both the not-starting-unintentional-fires and the burn-the-wicked-witch variety.
Having worked on the RR. I always noted they ran through swamps, but I also thought it was because it was flat. Back when these RR's were laid out the forests had been pretty much clear cut and New England was farmland.
 
Having worked on the RR. I always noted they ran through swamps, but I also thought it was because it was flat. Back when these RR's were laid out the forests had been pretty much clear cut and New England was farmland.

That, and wetlands were the only surefire non-agriculture land use so it was flat-out easier to secure easements through the swampiest parts of people's (then vastly larger) properties.

This wasn't necessarily true in most parts of the country where the RR's came first, and the people came by RR. Nor was it true of many of the New England branchlines that were more Civil War era when RR speculation was at its fever pitch. But it was definitely true for the first-half 1830's pioneers Boston & Lowell, Boston & Providence, Boston & Albany, Eastern RR, and the first incarnation of Boston & Maine (skipping Lawrence, and terminating Wilmington via the Wildcat). You can even see a difference in the mid-1840's RR's that came after the First Five: Fitchburg, Old Colony, New York & New England (Franklin Main), and the Boston Extension of the B&M via Reading. They hit the traditional downtowns of Reading, Concord, Norwood, Wakefield, Malden, Quincy/Braintree, Lawrence (after the B&M's realignment), etc. where the first-wave builds went out of their way to avoid.
 
Another posit that I'm sure has been rung out before, but what are the chances of Storrow Dr ever getting buried completely/more completely?

It's such a detrimental piece to the Esplanade. Just dreaming of a future where crossing over from the beautiful streets of Back Bay and Newbury would be a seamless promenade instead of bunched up and those bridges (Greenway pt 2?)

Whenever I'm ubering along it I always wondering how much demand must be pent up from the residents along north Beacon who back right up against it. No doubt with spectacular views of the river, but the noise and view down, privacy, etc must be a nightmare... There must be some willpower and money there for some Storrow diet right?
 
Another posit that I'm sure has been rung out before, but what are the chances of Storrow Dr ever getting buried completely/more completely?

It's such a detrimental piece to the Esplanade. Just dreaming of a future where crossing over from the beautiful streets of Back Bay and Newbury would be a seamless promenade instead of bunched up and those bridges (Greenway pt 2?)

Whenever I'm ubering along it I always wondering how much demand must be pent up from the residents along north Beacon who back right up against it. No doubt with spectacular views of the river, but the noise and view down, privacy, etc must be a nightmare... There must be some willpower and money there for some Storrow diet right?

Probably zero, because the existing EB tunnel by Copley and WB underpass by Science Park are heinous money pits for MassHighway maintenance for how inadequately they were waterproofed back in the day. The full shutdown/rebuild/resurface they did of the Copley tunnel 15 years ago is already nearing end-of-life. It's beyond the capability of improving in-place, because even if you expensively replaced or lengthened the tunnel now with brand-new construction you've got to consider all the above-and-beyonds for Charles Basin floodplain protection. And that's not going to get you new tunnels built, much less lengthened ones that have worse potential for the "storm drain effect".

Storrow/SFR/Embankment as it exists as thru parkway is basically in maintenance mode because it's such a maint-heavy anachronism ("Traffic on the Threes" reports they're fishing out this week's second Storrowed box truck as I write this post). The parts that won't ever be going away because they're unique catchments--Embankment Rd. Beacon Hill to 28/93 and SFR Kenmore-west--have some measure of 'discrete' single-point reinventions to thrash through while most of it stays stet. And also reshaping traffic loads so most of what is stet is no longer so goddamn awful. We're doing that with the whole Pike 'throat' saga right now with SFR...but there's also the (not moving real fast) scheme to redo the Charles Circle interchange to compact Embankment Rd. closer to MGH to reclaim more land by Ebersol Field, and that'll be pretty good too if it comes to pass (for one, getting rid of the dangerous left-exits). Maybe someday we'll even get around to compacting the Eliot Bridge ramp spaghetti in Cambridge. *Possibly* could even see a burial option between River St. and Western Ave. that compacts the surface roads on top since the riverbank wall is at its absolute highest there making that particular area the lowest overall flood risk in the whole Basin. Although burying the thru stretch in front of Genzyme would kind of be a luxury item in the grand scheme.

So...some individual parts can get better. You'll just never be looking at wholesale linear 'makeover'. Least of all on the Charlesgate-Beacon Hill midsection by the choicest-utilization Esplanade since that's the wholly Pike-redundant section we'll be hotly debating in coming years/decades whether we can get rid of in its entirety (or at least bust down from 6 lane quasi-expressway to 2-lane slow park access lane.
 
Least of all on the Charlesgate-Beacon Hill midsection by the choicest-utilization Esplanade since that's the wholly Pike-redundant section we'll be hotly debating in coming years/decades whether we can get rid of in its entirety (or at least bust down from 6 lane quasi-expressway to 2-lane slow park access lane.
Hmm that's an interesting thought and seems much more feasible. What about fully integrating it into the south street grid with stop lights and throwing away the express-way qualities entirely? Trim off a lane from each side. Consolidate Back St into it. Slow it waaaay down to a more pedestrian friendly road with crossings. Screw tunnels and weaving lanes.

I realize this is probably screwing over the traffic flow and adding travel time to get across the city...
This is my pipe dream walkable city with a fully integrated waterfront.
 
Hmm that's an interesting thought and seems much more feasible. What about fully integrating it into the south street grid with stop lights and throwing away the express-way qualities entirely? Trim off a lane from each side. Consolidate Back St into it. Slow it waaaay down to a more pedestrian friendly road with crossings. Screw tunnels and weaving lanes.

I realize this is probably screwing over the traffic flow and adding travel time to get across the city...
This is my pipe dream walkable city with a fully integrated waterfront.

The Pike has the Copley exit in both directions and is *slightly* under-capacity between Allston and 93. You need to keep SFR to/from Charlesgate as basically a glorified exit ramp to Kenmore/Fenway because of lack of acceptable Pike ramp options anywhere around BU, but past there Storrow traffic is hugely inflated by induced demand trying to beat the tolls to Copley. There's no load-bearing reason for it to exist. The paralleling surface streets like Beacon and Comm Ave. are not congested at all between Mass Ave. and the Public Gardens, and at least WB on the Pike you have the options (paper-studied to death but state seemingly never in a hurry to enact) to add another 1-2 sets of staggered on/offramps through the Back Bay to further smooth things over. The only compensation you truly must offer is to waive tolls on the Pike *between* Allston and 93 to shape traffic in that direction without getting auto-dinged @ Allston for the minimum-most touch on the tollway.

Unique catchment doesn't restart again until the Public Gardens onramp by Hatch Shell, which is the MA 28 mainline feeding to O'Brien Hwy. and the legit fastest route to/from 93 from Beacon Hill. That stays, but if the midsection thru traffic is gone you might be able to judiciously lane-drop Embankment from 6 to 4 in some non-ramp parts by MGH from the traffic reductions, helping a little more down there.


The home-run value proposition for deleting the midsection--which we've talked about often on aB--is a transit trade-in of Blue Line extension from Charles MGH to Kenmore. BLX-Kenmore is not in a vacuum anyone's idea of a Top 5 Most Wanted rapid transit build, but the Storrow trade-in presents a unique opportunity for substitution of the roadpack with a mode capable of carrying equal number of commuters within the same project area as the to-be-deleted parkway. Thus, if we have thrashed through the debate and decided that Storrow must go it's a transit build that can "debut at #1" so-to-speak for the funding streams it would attract from being a 1:1 trade-in for the same exact project area. Very situation-specific.

Also not a new idea. Long before Storrow ever ruined the riverbank there was a seriously studied Boston Transit Commission proposal for a Riverbank Subway on that very alignment, where shallow tunneling would've kept the parkland. The idea got shelved by about 1910 because they didn't have a great idea of what trunkline to hook it up to, but transit trade-in of Storrow basically follows what was studied as a high-demand route way back when via Blue Line attachment. With primary upside of load relief for Kenmore and an overstuffed Green Line after all those new Fenway/Pike skyscrapers have saturated the area to the limit...and load transfer of downtown loads to 6-car HRT trains so GL @ Kenmore can absorb way more in the way of branch and radial expansion instead like full-on Urban Ring hookup.

This "Riverbank Subway Redux" would be built in a shallow box tunnel trenching down on the vacated Storrow EB roadpack attached to the Back St. retaining wall. Unlike traditional cut-and-cover which goes about 50 ft. under street with a 'sandwich' layer of utilities, this tunnel would be semi-surface like the Red Line Fields Corner-Ashmont capped cut or the Wellington tunnel on the Orange Line. i.e. No utilities needing to be relocated because it's on the waterfront sitting on the vacant Storrow roadpack with nothing underneath...therefore much cheaper tunneling. In essence, it's a capped box that digs maybe a variable 8-10 ft. below the current Storrow pavement level with a roof that sticks 2-4 ft. above ground. A rebuilt Back St. retaining wall will frame the inbound-side tunnel wall, and it'll be topped off with a dirt hill and plantings almost like a "BU Beach South". Intermediate stops at "Esplanade" (roughly where the current EB road tunnel is), "Beacon" (in the deep cut under Mass Ave.), and Kenmore with cut-and-cover from Beacon St. to Brookline Ave. underpinning the southernmost tip of the GL level at narrow, least-invasive angle. Storage tail tracks then fizz out at start of Brookline Ave., and 100-year future considerations for further extension are provisioned by going further up Brookline Ave. either to Longwood/Brookline Village or bang-a-right under the B&A tracks at the Mass Pike en route to West Station. Nothing past-Kenmore would ever be a part of this build because funding would be constrained to the 1:1 parkway trade-in in the same project area, and we don't today have any consensus ideas on what further to serve. So just FYI that as "future considerations" only, another project for another time.

The very compelling upshot (in addition to the ridership trade-in aspect) is that the very construction of the tunnel framing a new Back St. wall and earthen berm will create enhanced passive flood protection for the whole Back Bay street grid at cut-rate cost, and the extreme-shallow semi-surface nature of the transit tunnel makes it so that the Blue Line stays dry with nothing but full-passive wall and drainage. It actually provides a very attractive/compelling shotgun solution of transit AND an enhanced flood protection solution in one intrinsically cheap-construction build, while giving you enhanced parkland. That's very different from the kind of active flood protection we'll have to be building on things like the Green Line-Transitway connector and NSRL, so cut-rate $$$ FTW.

As for the parkland, the 3-lane Storrow WB carriageway would be more-or-less remanicured into a traffic-calmed 2-lane park access road spanning Charlesgate and Beacon Hill, probably with parking shoulders for Esplanade events. The "more-or-less" part means actual roadway dimensions for the park lane may straddle onto some remnants of the EB left-lane pack in variable spots and serve up some strips of reclaimed waterfront acreage (esp. by the Lagoon), but will more or less be centered on the current WB carriageway. The "BU Beach South" berm over the transit-converted then topped-off EB carriageway adds at least 40 ft. of rec/greenspace on the Back St. side, and you can connect all the N-S alphabet streets on the Back Bay grid directly to it over the roof of the tunnel by doing raised crossings at the intersections. Raised crossings every block (approx. 625 ft.) from Berkeley to Hereford ensures that the park lane provides 'a' retained level of motor-vehicle accessibility to the Hatch Shell while having a de facto enforced 20 MPH speed limit that's physically impossible to abuse as an induced demand shortcut for Beacon/Comm Ave. And, the frequency of the raised crossings w/ grid connections encourages rigorous usage of the "Beach" land along Back St. as an attraction you cross to-and-fro from the riverfront to make recreational use of rather than being one of the proverbial 'bad' examples of static greenspace that's there to look at but not use.


Mind you, a lot has to fall into place to make this work. Starting with the slugfest debate on whether we even want to delete the midsection as a thru parkway, because the highly situational transit trade-in doesn't rate at all without that prereq mechanism. But you can see how all the various interests here...traffic sustainability, transit sustainability, parkland sustainability, flood protection sustainability...dovetail together in a really fucking attractive (and NOT overly expensive!) package if the dominoes fall in the right order.
 
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Consolidate Back St into it.

I'm pretty sure Back St is legally a private way/alley just like the ones to the south in the rest of Back Bay. I base that on the crazy patchwork asphalt with dumpsters and various different private parking arrangements along the path. None of the parking, whether on the "street" or in the "backyards" is open to the public. I think you'd have one hell of a legal fight with every abutting property owner to do that. And those aren't exactly the sorts of property owners who have any trouble with financing that fight.

I also think it'd be pretty difficult to figure out how to directly interface/integrate that with any sort of "Storrow Lite".

The wall to wall sea of garages and surface parking on the properties opening directly into the path seem like the most intractable problem even if you imagine you can take control of the "road" portion. They're going to continue to need an alley/"frontage road". Having them all open directly onto "Storrow Lite" would be a safety disaster, with cars entering/exiting everywhere and with likely poor sight lines for many.
 
I'm pretty sure Back St is legally a private way/alley just like the ones to the south in the rest of Back Bay. I base that on the crazy patchwork asphalt with dumpsters and various different private parking arrangements along the path. None of the parking, whether on the "street" or in the "backyards" is open to the public. I think you'd have one hell of a legal fight with every abutting property owner to do that. And those aren't exactly the sorts of property owners who have any trouble with financing that fight.

I also think it'd be pretty difficult to figure out how to directly interface/integrate that with any sort of "Storrow Lite".

The wall to wall sea of garages and surface parking on the properties opening directly into the path seem like the most intractable problem even if you imagine you can take control of the "road" portion. They're going to continue to need an alley/"frontage road". Having them all open directly onto "Storrow Lite" would be a safety disaster, with cars entering/exiting everywhere and with likely poor sight lines for many.

There's also a significant grade difference between Back St. and the riverfront because of the retaining wall. Which is of meandering, rather than constant, height to boot. Anything that replaces Storrow here (be it my last write-up or whatever) is going to involve a re-graded topsoil gentle slope down from the Back St. wall to the parkland and not a P.I.T.A. raising of the hard-packed layers of Storrow EB to fashion a "Back Boulevard"...that by its very nature of being an alley would have to have some grade separation sprawl to it for the resident parking and trash pickup. Keep it simple by keeping them separate.

So Storrow WB (more or less...some compacting on Storrow EB left-lane is possible) is basically the lazy park access road. Storrow EB becomes a gently graded grassy hill (whether there's a Blue Line tunnel running 5 ft. under it or not). The alphabet streets all come across--Back St. stop sign to park lane stop sign--to raised crossings every block on the park road to enforce traffic calming. And the block-frequency of crossings ensures copious foot/bike traffic across the grid and use of the graded berm along Back St. as its own rec spot "BU Beach"-style...while the fence breaks at each block transform the way the currently hermetically-sealed Esplanade is accessed from the outside.

I'm not in favor of total absolute 100% zero-roadway rollback to 1920 here because basic accessibility favors having *some* sort of vehicular access to the waterfront for equitable drop-off access and Esplanade special events if little else...so the lazy lane kind of needs to be there in some form, and separated from Back St. in some form because of the inherent messiness of the alley config. But if all the alphabet streets span to it on the grid and each intersection features a full-raised crossing it becomes physically impossible to accelerate >25 MPH across the entirety of the access lane. And I think that accomplishes exactly what we want here for balancing inviting full access while slamming the door shut on all invasive forms of car cheating getting in pedestrians' way.
 
Putting this here to avoid derailing the NEC/Downeaster thread too badly: Honestly, I've always thought they should have looked at rail with trail for the former Central Mass / Norwottuck rail trail that parallels RT9 as part of that Central Corridor study. I realise this basically duplicates the B43, but as nice as its 20 minute headways and the PVTA in this area are, RT9 gets slammed with commuters going to I-91 bound for Greenfield or Springfield. Even with the Valley Flyer, the B43 doesn't stop directly at or anywhere near Northampton station before crossing the river; it is a pain to get from the station to the B43. Especially if the Valley Flyer becomes a continuing service, a rail connection at Northampton to a reasonably high frequency DMU could be attractive. If it bounces between Smith, Northhampton Station, Hampshire/Mountain Farms Malls (redev?), Amherst College, Amherst Center @ Main, UMass Amherst Campus (barely, @ Tilson Farms, but if you were particularly ambitious I think you could get it down Eastman in a central reservation, maybe all the way to Mullins).

If you were truly ambitious, you could run some one seaters up from Springfield, or extend down the Manhan trail to Easthampton, and up to Williamsburg via Florence, where the RoW looks surprisingly intact.
 
Putting this here to avoid derailing the NEC/Downeaster thread too badly: Honestly, I've always thought they should have looked at rail with trail for the former Central Mass / Norwottuck rail trail that parallels RT9 as part of that Central Corridor study. I realise this basically duplicates the B43, but as nice as its 20 minute headways and the PVTA in this area are, RT9 gets slammed with commuters going to I-91 bound for Greenfield or Springfield. Even with the Valley Flyer, the B43 doesn't stop directly at or anywhere near Northampton station before crossing the river; it is a pain to get from the station to the B43. Especially if the Valley Flyer becomes a continuing service, a rail connection at Northampton to a reasonably high frequency DMU could be attractive. If it bounces between Smith, Northhampton Station, Hampshire/Mountain Farms Malls (redev?), Amherst College, Amherst Center @ Main, UMass Amherst Campus (barely, @ Tilson Farms, but if you were particularly ambitious I think you could get it down Eastman in a central reservation, maybe all the way to Mullins).

If you were truly ambitious, you could run some one seaters up from Springfield, or extend down the Manhan trail to Easthampton, and up to Williamsburg via Florence, where the RoW looks surprisingly intact.

I think problem is lack of state-owned ROW's out there, as even where there are contiguous trails the underlying land ownership is a patchwork mess of easements plugging holes from the original abandonments. Easthampton Branch was wholly-owned by tiny Pioneer Valley RR (who are very busy down by Westfield/Holyoke) into downtown Easthampton and when the business dried up they sold direct to the municipalities for the rail trail. Top-down state control's not really possible there. Also was some Guilford/PAR fuckery on the Mt. Tom Branch abandonment spanning east of Downtown to the Conn River Line to keep Pioneer Valley bottled up inland. The westernmost Central Mass portion--called the Wheelwright Branch after the CM midsections all got cut out--was also left to property-lapse after its '84 abandonment so is a string job of municipal ownership w/easements sans landbanking that you really couldn't get any service going on. That leaves only the active lines and a ping job up the Conn River narrowly missing Greenfield Station to turn down the Deerfield Branch and Fitchburg Main to Millers Falls. Where you'd have to make a reverse move on the Central Vermont wye to get back south to Amherst. Cumbersome...and the freight traffic through East Deerfield Yard (PAS's largest) tends to be on the extreme side certain times of day when big trains are coming in/out of the yard so the dispatcher interference potential would be akin to the Vermonter's much-loathed and unmissed Palmer reverse.

The network's unfortunately a bit shredded here because the abandonments were all early/mid-80's before the state was investing aggressively in landbanking outside of Eastern MA passenger territory. Easthampton/Mt. Tom a particularly vexing one, because to interchange with PAS today Pioneer Valley has to do a couple blocks of street-running in Downtown Holyoke to hit the small yard next to the Amtrak station. The cumbersome on-street shove moves sharply limit the number of carloads they can exchange on a given day. PV had hoped to be able to get control of the Mt. Tom Branch for a cleaner interchange for longer string of cars, but Guilford/PAR fucked them over and they couldn't afford to hold onto the rest of the Easthampton Branch stub after business dried up in hopes of saving the penny jar to buy it themselves when fuckery was the game someone else was playing.
 
Is there a pitch that would get rapid transit to the center/northeast side of Charlestown? Half to serve the hill and half to redevelop the Mystic waterfront?

Like going onward to Chelsea?
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Here's another one: let Malden turn the Orange line due East at Oak Grove and pop up at the dense area in Northeast Malden. I think it is a single stop, tunneled extension.
 
Is there a pitch that would get rapid transit to the center/northeast side of Charlestown? Half to serve the hill and half to redevelop the Mystic waterfront?

Like going onward to Chelsea?
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Here's another one: let Malden turn the Orange line due East at Oak Grove and pop up at the dense area in Northeast Malden. I think it is a single stop, tunneled extension.

Not OG...that far up it's sort of threading the last due north-south density pocket stringing Malden & Melrose together. East-West it's surrounded on all sides by the Fels, Forest Dale Cemetery, and other assorted conservation land out to Revere that was land-granted to the city for parks by some 17th c. landed nobility's giant honking estate. No way; you've well overshot the paths to the density pockets by that stop and are full-bore committed to Melrose-or-bust as next catchment by that Western Route milepost.

Forking at Malden Center is conceptually OK because the Saugus Branch ROW is 4 blocks east under Centre, and because branching at a major bus terminal with halfed frequencies points-after is worlds better than the Mystic Working Group's Everett OL Branch forking before MC terminal and destroying connecting frequencies to a ton of buses. MC branching is actually quite a solid scheme on the demand-side fundamentals. The problem is then what the hell do you do with the grade crossing apocalypse on the Saugus Branch? You could functionally El it without spending kajillions of dollars, but it would run at variable mid-block height past the second-floor windows of >100 owner-occupied homes so the sightline objections would be quite a bit more substantive than "NIMBY". And keep in mind that Malden already successfully rioted against an OL El to its defeat once in the last century, so those are maybe not superb gambling odds to begin with. Subwaying any further than just getting on-alignment down Centre between MC and the Saugus ROW's crossing of Centre is also going to torpedo its value proposition on cost.


The other possibility is that if Orange swallows CR to Reading you will have a fungible 4-track ROW with only a maximum 3 OL tracks in-use all points from Reading Jct. in Somerville to Medford St. Malden. Should you bring the Green Line up to Sullivan/Assembly for Urban Ring, it would be possible to branch it at Assembly to continue north dual-moded side-by-side to Malden Ctr. by stealing OL Tk. 3 Assembly-north and running the modes 2 x 2. You'd have a few blocks of embankment-reshaping to do up to MC and would no longer have enough side-by-side room to do an Edgeworth infill stop, but it's feasible to dual-mode the corridor that way in an Orange-swallows-Reading universe that deletes the CR track. Problem now is...could there be anything worse than a non- grade-separated Saugus Branch for ops and punctuality? Maybe the MC fork makes considerably less of a mess of Urban Ring NE quadrant headways than forking @ Sweetser Circle to the Saugus Branch from the Everett side of the river, but those mid-block grade crossings one after another after another are still going to make the B Line look like the Red Line by comparison.


So we're not kwaaaaaazy here in terms of there being a feasible-build way to get from A to B that fits a demand profile and adheres to branching "golden rules" re: demand profile and where to/not-to fork. It's more that all manner of functional transit goes to die on the lack of Saugus Branch grade separation, and there's no easy solve for that because subway is too blowout-cost and El (partial or complete) east of Centre St. would be too violently opposed (for mostly justifiable reasons). If there were non-Crazy solves for the Saugus Branch crossings we'd have a bumper crop of viable proposals spanning multiple different mode options. There really aren't any...they either sail off into Crazy cost, are kludge-fests painful as passing a kidney stone, or rely on utterly magical thinking that car counts at crossings aren't really as problematic as decades of neutrally-counted data says they are and overdose on the "Beeeelieeeeeve!" Find a way around that obstruction at long last and the Transit Pitch floodgates open. Until then...ugh...same rock, same hard hard place, same untenable squeeze between.
 
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Is there a pitch that would get rapid transit to the center/northeast side of Charlestown? Half to serve the hill and half to redevelop the Mystic waterfront?

Like going onward to Chelsea?

Something like this?

GLX Charlestown.jpg


It's just a line on a map, no real thought into whether it's elevated over Chelsea St, or streetcar. But that's how it would tie into North Station using the track sidings that pitch down adjacent to the ramp up to the Lechmere viaduct.

Crossing to Chelsea is a whole other beast that would require major infrastructure.
 
Something like this?

View attachment 6592

It's just a line on a map, no real thought into whether it's elevated over Chelsea St, or streetcar. But that's how it would tie into North Station using the track sidings that pitch down adjacent to the ramp up to the Lechmere viaduct.

Crossing to Chelsea is a whole other beast that would require major infrastructure.

If the Haymarket portal were unsealed for a Greenway Streetcar, you could easily do this one on-surface rather than trying to kludge something off the tunnel where the 93 ramps west of NS Terminal make for convoluted swerving.

Problem is...#1 Greenway trolley is a (semi-useful, but still...) luxury toy eleventeenth on the priority pile while top-priorities-with-a-bullet like GL-Transitway bleed from open wounds from never being mounted. So that only makes sense on completist scruples when we're sitting at a much more overall built-out rapid transit grid.

#2...Charlestown isn't at a loss of bus frequencies at all. The 93's plenty-assed frequent to City Square and the the Navy Yard. Augment there and you have 95% of your solve. As for Chelsea, the 111 should make immediate use of the Tobin bus lanes. There's a definite scale-up to be had there, since everything else Chelsea-hitting comes out of Maverick or Malden Center. A Sullivan-Chelsea route would also really hit the spot. Remember, absolute-zero buses currently use Rutherford Ave. eastbound out of Sullivan, so a 111 complement out of Sullivan-via-Tobin is effortless gap-filler for sure.
 
How about: Elevator up from Navy Yard to BRT stops on the old Tobin toll plazas?

If not used by CTown residents, it would give bus commuters access to jobs in the Navy Yard
 
None of that affects the core of my pitch though; while annoyingly Northhampton nor Amherst have public GIS, the entire length associated with the Norwottuck trail from Northampton Union to Amherst is owned by "Mass, Commonwealth of, DCR / Fisheries and Wildlife." Evidently, the state acquired the RoW in '85. You'd only need to add a short 1000ft segment to turn north to UMass, edging around Amherst College's tennis field parking. Extending down Manhan to the Smith campus proper is a bit more annoying, but its less than 1/2 a mile; so short that its all City of Northampton owned trail or parking lots. Sure, you can't really justify going further north without new and expensive RoW, and Easthampton & Williamsburg are perhaps too fragmentary, but a light rail shuttle, like the NJT River Line bouncing between the Smith and UMass via Amherst (College/town) and Hadley? Yes, it is functionally a direct replacement for the traffic snarled B43, but thats a route with enough demand to justify 60ft bendy buses. Assuming 100% capture of the B43 rider base, @~3500 riders, thats not far off Norfolk VA's Tide service over a similar length. With induced demand, being faster than the average 12mph the B43 manages, it should do better. That said, the extant B43 is exactly why this is a crazy pitch & will never be funded; but it has built in ridership, connecting to the Valley Flyer service to Greenfield, Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, and beyond.
 
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None of that affects the core of my pitch though; while annoyingly Northhampton nor Amherst have public GIS, the entire length associated with the Norwottuck trail from Northampton Union to Amherst is owned by "Mass, Commonwealth of, DCR / Fisheries and Wildlife." Evidently, the state acquired the RoW in '85. You'd only need to add a short 1000ft segment to turn north to UMass, edging around Amherst College's tennis field parking.

The State Rail Map (or at least the old disappeared PDF ones that differentiate the landbanks from the any-old GIS ROW's) do not have the Wheelwright Branch as a rail charter landbanking; the land title came after extinguishment with a stitch job for building the trail. That means the land underneath it may be wholly-owned today by DCR (after some cobble-together over time), but there is not continuity-of-charter designating it as a reactivateable resting rail corridor. Any such scheme would have to be an all-new service + zoning change, with every easement holder on the strip of land having legal injunction means. It doesn't matter how intact that one is; in an era where fed-protected landbanks themselves are hard as fuck to pry back from the NIMBY's the lapsed charters are damn near lost causes. The logic of corridor preservation via trail thus is an end to itself, as it's basically placeholding for an era beyond planning consideration (i.e. 50+ years) on the chance that reactivation politics and state impetus for overpowering property challenges are in a radically different place than they are today.

The federal landbanking statute didn't come around until '86 and give a filing mechanism for third parties to self-file with the feds for adjudication of corridor preservation, and force companies like Guilford to bend to that instead of just extinguishing ROW's in a keep-away move. The approx. 1000 miles of ROW buys the state got prior to '86 were from the bankruptcy-court brokered sales of Penn Central assets in '73 and B&M assets in '76 under a "proto-landbanking" agreement shepherded through the federal courts, which thankfully back-dated intact ops charters back to some 1960's NYNH&H abandonments that were ensnared in the bankruptcy from final approval. Then between '74 and '86 when pre-IPO Conrail was a ward of the U.S. gov't they larded on a bunch more "proto-landbank" flotsam (longest: the Dennis-Wellfleet section of Cape Cod Main that had been gone for decades but still un-abandoned) as a first-refusal policy directive stemming from the gov't ownership. Pretty much the only Conrail dispersal the state didn't manage to get its hands on was the Wrentham Branch from Walpole to N. Attleboro, because the state got outbid by a private utility.


Different story with B&M/Guilford abandonments '76-86...of which there were a shitload because B&M did lots more pruning to finally close on its bankruptcy and turn its first profit for FY1980. Many of those--like the Wheelwright Branch--were filed for abandonment prior to Guilford's '83 buyout, but not processed until post-takeover. The B&M Historical Society website has a (messy) hand-annotated "1980 system plan" map with marker highlights of lines with prior permission for abandonment (i.e. they were still serving trace customers, but had the go-ahead to pull the rug out and were just waiting for the post-merger owners to decide) and ones they were targeting for abandonment filings that hadn't been approved. The Conn River region--above all others--was absolutely shredded. And that's not surprising given what was to come with Amtrak's eminent domain lawsuit over the corridor's fast-failing track conditions. Guilford proceeded to dump ballast on those branches as fast as humanly possible, and the map was shredded WITHOUT landbanking as a result. And that's also why you have zero shortlines on the northside taking up ex- B&M territory. Unlike the Penn Central/Conrail dispersals which gave birth to Pioneer Valley, Mass Central, Bay Colony...and continuing through today with Mass Coastal...those shredded regions that fell in the 'gap' years of landbanking didn't have mechanism for new recruitment. Which utterly sucks because Pioneer Valley was screaming "TAKE MY MONEY!" at the Wheelwright, Mt. Tom, Chicopee Falls, and Westover Branches that are all disappeared because "Fuck you, we're Guilford and we can". Or, even more infuriatingly, severing of the Armory Branch at the CT state line depriving a now uber-strategic Springfield Line of high-and-wide freight bypass to Hartford by senseless wholly-intact few miles in Longmeadow & Springfield that's now succumbing to tribal trail politics.


Now...tale of contrast in NH when the 'Upper' Conn River's branches got shredded in similar fashion in the late-80's by a then- strike-addled Guilford that really really had stopped giving a damn. Those were all post-'86, so New Hampshire landbanked everything it could get its hands on, and managed to recruit a few homeless-man's shortlines (Milford & Bennington, New England Southern, New Hampshire Central) for some territories that are still alive and kicking today up in the northlands. Their state rail map shows the proper-landbanked stuff they scooped up from Guilford in the '86-95 decade:
  • Cheshire Branch (Conn River @ Bellows Falls to Fitchburg Line @ Ashburnham via Keene)
  • Ashuelot Branch (Conn River @ Hinsdale to Cheshire Branch @ Keene)
  • bypassed section of Conn River Main (Northfield, MA-Brattleboro) isolated by an early-1970's bridge collapse where current tracks to Brattleboro were old Central Vermont side of the river. Severed segment kept for Ashuelot Branch access.
  • Berlin Branch (complete Conn RIver @ VT to St. Lawrence & Atlantic @ Gorham)
  • Portsmouth Branch (Manchester-Newmarket)
  • Eastern Route Main (MA State Line to Portsmouth)...Seabrook-north a 90's abandonment, Salisbury-Seabrook a late paper dispersal from long-term Out-of-Service
  • Manchester & Lawrence (MA State Line-Manchester)...excl. Derry gap from earlier severing
  • Northern Main (Concord-White River Jct.)
  • ...many fragmented or mini-branched others
Some of those, being 95-100% charter-complete, are decent reactivation candidates. Eastern, Northern, M&L, Portsmouth Branch for intra-NH pax...Cheshire as a better-funcioning North Station-MTL route than the intrinsically shitty Northern. Berlin Branch cut-over to ski country via Portland passenger service on St. Lawrence & Atlantic main. But you can Crazy Pitch those easier because of the landbank timeframe than you can the Conn River neighborhood in MA...which is legally just shredded.


You see why the feds closed up the loopholes in the '86 law. MassDOT had some of the biggest gripes of anyone in the lobbying for that given what slipped through their fingers in the years immediately prior. The Conn River region was unfortunately a tragedy of time-and-place. Legally we just have to work the corridor preservation on the land side and hope for a different era where the NIMBY's aren't so unimpeded for using easement-rights tactics as a chew toy. As Western Mass/1st Congressional District goes you're not touching any of this property-law quagmire until you're long done admiring your finished work on the Berkshire Flyer picking up passengers on a rail-with-trail reactivated-from-landbank Pittsfield & North Adams Line...because that was the first big contiguous post-'86 Guilford abandonment the state was able to nab the intact RR charter on.
 
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The State Rail Map (or at least the old disappeared PDF ones that differentiate the landbanks from the any-old GIS ROW's) do not have the Wheelwright Branch as a rail charter landbanking; the land title came after extinguishment with a stitch job for building the trail. That means the land underneath it may be wholly-owned today by DCR (after some cobble-together over time), but there is not continuity-of-charter designating it as a reactivateable resting rail corridor. Any such scheme would have to be an all-new service + zoning change, with every easement holder on the strip of land having legal injunction means. It doesn't matter how intact that one is; in an era where fed-protected landbanks themselves are hard as fuck to pry back from the NIMBY's the lapsed charters are damn near lost causes. The logic of corridor preservation via trail thus is an end to itself, as it's basically placeholding for an era beyond planning consideration (i.e. 50+ years) on the chance that reactivation politics and state impetus for overpowering property challenges are in a radically different place than they are today.

The federal landbanking statute didn't come around until '86 and give a filing mechanism for third parties to self-file with the feds for adjudication of corridor preservation, and force companies like Guilford to bend to that instead of just extinguishing ROW's in a keep-away move. The approx. 1000 miles of ROW buys the state got prior to '86 were from the bankruptcy-court brokered sales of Penn Central assets in '73 and B&M assets in '76 under a "proto-landbanking" agreement shepherded through the federal courts, which thankfully back-dated intact ops charters back to some 1960's NYNH&H abandonments that were ensnared in the bankruptcy from final approval. Then between '74 and '86 when pre-IPO Conrail was a ward of the U.S. gov't they larded on a bunch more "proto-landbank" flotsam (longest: the Dennis-Wellfleet section of Cape Cod Main that had been gone for decades but still un-abandoned) as a first-refusal policy directive stemming from the gov't ownership. Pretty much the only Conrail dispersal the state didn't manage to get its hands on was the Wrentham Branch from Walpole to N. Attleboro, because the state got outbid by a private utility.


Different story with B&M/Guilford abandonments '76-86...of which there were a shitload because B&M did lots more pruning to finally close on its bankruptcy and turn its first profit for FY1980. Many of those--like the Wheelwright Branch--were filed for abandonment prior to Guilford's '83 buyout, but not processed until post-takeover. The B&M Historical Society website has a (messy) hand-annotated "1980 system plan" map with marker highlights of lines with prior permission for abandonment (i.e. they were still serving trace customers, but had the go-ahead to pull the rug out and were just waiting for the post-merger owners to decide) and ones they were targeting for abandonment filings that hadn't been approved. The Conn River region--above all others--was absolutely shredded. And that's not surprising given what was to come with Amtrak's eminent domain lawsuit over the corridor's fast-failing track conditions. Guilford proceeded to dump ballast on those branches as fast as humanly possible, and the map was shredded WITHOUT landbanking as a result. And that's also why you have zero shortlines on the northside taking up ex- B&M territory. Unlike the Penn Central/Conrail dispersals which gave birth to Pioneer Valley, Mass Central, Bay Colony...and continuing through today with Mass Coastal...those shredded regions that fell in the 'gap' years of landbanking didn't have mechanism for new recruitment. Which utterly sucks because Pioneer Valley was screaming "TAKE MY MONEY!" at the Wheelwright, Mt. Tom, Chicopee Falls, and Westover Branches that are all disappeared because "Fuck you, we're Guilford and we can". Or, even more infuriatingly, severing of the Armory Branch at the CT state line depriving a now uber-strategic Springfield Line of high-and-wide freight bypass to Hartford by senseless wholly-intact few miles in Longmeadow & Springfield that's now succumbing to tribal trail politics.

Now I'm confused. The Rails to Trails ammendment provision of the Trails Act, codified as 16 USC. § 1247(d), was passed in 1983, unless there's a different law I'm missing somewhere? In general, I assume that as long as it has "rail trail" in the name, and was acquired after 1983, it's been railbanked. In the case of the Highland Division, which I assume is the armory branch you speak of, given its stub end in Enfield, only left service in 93; I assume it was railbanked on transfer.

Edit: This is the MassDOT arcGIS Rail Inventory. I have no idea what "type 7" or "Type 3" denote; knowing that would help, as Northampton is Type 7, Highland Division type 3
 
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Now I'm confused. The Rails to Trails ammendment provision of the Trails Act, codified as 16 USC. § 1247(d), was passed in 1983, unless there's a different law I'm missing somewhere? In general, I assume that as long as it has "rail trail" in the name, and was acquired after 1983, it's been railbanked. In the case of the Highland Division, which I assume is the armory branch you speak of, given its stub end in Enfield, only left service in 93; I assume it was railbanked on transfer.

'83 was the Trails System Act affording liability-free transfer of the charter for landbanking, but it was strictly voluntary on the RR's part and most just ignored it. '86 was the reauthorization of the Interstate Commerce Commission (Surface Transportation Board's pre-'96 predecessor body) with rule change for adjudicating on third-party filings for a landbank regardless of whether the railroad was willing. That's the one that gave the feds enforcement of "negotiating windows"...where the window isn't declared closed until both negotiating parties say it is. That's how you're able to keep the Bruce Freeman Trail south section under continuing sale negotiation 12 years after CSX basically said "pay up or bite me" on their over-inflated asking price. And same with PAR for almost as long over the stalled Lowell Industrial Track sale blocking any movement on The Bruce's Lowell extension. Those negotiations could drag another 10 years unchanged if the RR's don't want to play ball, but they aren't over until the feds act to close the docket for the negotiating window...and unless the buying parties (state/towns) are acting in deplorably bad faith they pretty much never close the docket unless the interested buyer voluntarily withdraws. Allowing adverse abandonment claims in the public interest and two-to-tango brokered negotiating were both '86 statutes. Thus, '86 is the only year that truly matters for being able to pull off a real landbank because that's when it started being formally regulated top-down under interstate commerce instead of a voluntary 'charity' thing that no RR in their incumbent mind would ever consider.

Except for the B&M & Penn Central asset dumps slapped with "proto-landbanking" by the bankruptcy court and gov't-owned Conrail's 70's-80's practice of voluntary first-refusal charter pickups for lines it was pruning...all federally-recognized landbanks in MA postdate 1986. The very first federally processed case in MA was Bay Colony's rights abandonment of the Greenbush Line in '86 from the Weymouth Landing vicinity (outermost limits of Fore River's daily backup move) to Cohasset 2 years after the last freight to the former Cohasset military spur (Whitney Spur Rail Trail, right off the station platform). Though that had already being an MBTA-owned line since the '73 Penn Central asset buy, so the only paperwork formality was filing the extinguished rights away in a landbank. The very first formal fed adjudication of a Guilford-owned abandonment (i.e. not T-owned from the B&M '76 firesale) in MA was the Pittsfield & North Adams midsection in '92.

Everything else was shredded to discontignuity before the ICC's '86 reauth gave the state a challenge mechanism. You have to look north of the border to NHDOT where all the mass-abandonments were post-'86; they managed to save virtually everything by filing fed paperwork like clockwork each time.



Late 1985 was the last recorded Guilford move on the Armory Branch across the CT/MA state line, when they very suddenly truncated service to South Windsor due to "track conditions" in a power move to cancel extant customer contracts. They pulled a quickie earth-salt abandonment docket of an extremely short customer-less section in Longmeadow, then dispensed of the discontiguous rest later. ConnDOT threatened legal action to keep them from doing anything to the out-of-service section to the state line, so they were able to install homeless-man's shortline Central New England RR and get it going again by the late-90's after Guilford pulled totally out...and CT lobbied MassDOT hard to buy up everything discontiguous on their side of the border ASAP to preserve the corridor. A gas pipeline company ended up doing the functional work preserving it in contignuity...but MassDOT didn't act after repeated implorings ("work with MassDOT" re: corridor preservation is still a bullet item in the CT State Rail Plan). That's how you end up with the mess that exists today with trail politics playing a blocking move just as the states are getting all 'vision thing' about future Springfield Line traffic. Similar stealth "micro-abandonments" were how Guilford managed to keep Pioneer Valley from getting hands on the Mt. Tom Branch to get its preferred interchange out of Easthampton, and for preventing Green Mountain (present-day Vermont Rail System) from getting a lucrative freight lane into MA via the Keene, NH cluster and Gardner.
 
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