F-Line to Dudley
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Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade
DMU's and EMU's don't need to be one or the other. As noted, you can shift the DMU fleet around to other diesel lines. Of which there are easily 4 or 5 routes ready-serve for 'em. And the driver for an EMU fleet is going to be Providence + RIDOT South County CR on the NEC, not Fairmount. The fleet scale of Providence, etc.'s 2020's decade needs dwarfs the xMU vehicle requirements for Fairmount. It's a rough, exaggerated analogue of New Haven Line vs. Shore Line East...SLE's share of the M8 fleet running 2-4 car consists on a modest schedule is a drop in the bucket vs. the 8-10 car consists that saturate the New Haven Line minutes apart. SLE just sips off the very tail end of Metro North's option orders. That's more or less what Fairmount would do if the T and RIDOT went all-in on an NEC pool order.
Keep in mind, the T is not going to be mass-purchasing DMU's or displacing the push-pull fleet. They're a terrible fit for all the 495-oriented lines that need the huge seating capacity of a 6 bi-level push-pull consist because their headways can never be tight enough, and the performance difference with wide stop spacing is not huge. It widens to meaningful levels only with tight stop density and the premium on fast boarding that comes with local/inner, clock-facing service. The T is not going back to the Budd days where Newburyport only ran 1 round trip today on a singlet or 2-car. Ridership in the 60's and 70's was a whole different universe. With the unit cost of DMU's being what they are, those are only for the targeted 128-turning local/neighborhood routes where 1-3 single-levels running frequently will do it. Different vehicles for different purposes.
If Fairmount gets wires and there's a pool EMU fleet, send them to Riverside-via-Worcester. If Riverside gets wires, send them to Reading or Waltham/128 via Fitchburg. Fairmount and Worcester are the only southside lines with projected frequencies dense enough to pay off the capital investment in wires. The northside is going to stay all-diesel until/unless the N-S Link forces the issue. And that'll be beyond the lifespan of a first DMU order. So if the vehicle market is sufficiently up-to-task for an order that'll return investment (note: today that's still iffy, so they're well-advised to be careful doing their homework and not hastily rush), go for it. They will always be have some line on the system where they're ideally fit even if they shift around. From Day 1 till the day those first vehicles get retired. Service obsolescence is not a concern at all.
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As for electrification of the Fairmount, as long as clearances are OK for 25 kV wires it shouldn't be that expensive. Here's how the NEC west-of-New Haven electrification works:
-- Large substations approx. every 30 miles. Currently located in Branford, New London, Warwick, and Sharon. All of them have future upgrade space to add equipment for capacity boosts when commuter rail uses the whole length of the Shoreline and most of MA/RI gets 3 wired tracks...as you can see from how empty the Sharon site is compared to, say, your average residential power substation like this one at Alewife.
-- Switching stations at phase breaks (i.e. the circuit breakers controlling stretches of overhead). Placed halfway between large substations in Westbrook, Richmond, and Norton (west side of tracks...that's a cell tower on the east side)
-- Small paralleling stations every 6 miles. Ones on the Providence Line are in Roxbury, Readville at the NEC/Fairmount junction, East Foxboro, Norton at the switching station, Attleboro, and Providence.
Amtrak's NEC Infrastructure Master Plan calls for a major substation to be added near Southampton to power the necessary SS expansion, Southampton expansion, tri- and quad-tracking inside 128, and commuter rail traffic...separating the power-hungry terminal end from Sharon. They would be paying for a majority of it since it's their terminal yard and driven as an Amtrak-first initiative, with the T chucking in proportional for commuter rail sharing. It is quite likely to be provisioned with lots of open expansion space like Sharon is, because all that was planned out pretty immaculately a decade in advance of the Acela.
-- Southampton is where Fairmount would tether off as its 'home' substation. The expandability of the site would support future Worcester electrification on the T's dime if they gradually added equipment to the substation. Again, majority fed/Amtrak funding on the initial build with T paying in for CR sharing and future expansion of the site.
-- The existing Readville site would be the anchor on the other end, since it's at the junction. Being at the midpoint between Southampton and Sharon substations, it would be upgraded to a combo switching and parallel station like Norton is. Amtrak would pay vast majority since switching station there is a requirement if they build anything at Southampton. Not a coincidence that the Readville one is placed in no-man's land between the junction...Amtrak had all these gradual expansion provisions immaculately planned 20 years ago.
-- 1 paralleling substation would have to be installed somewhere in the middle of the Fairmount somewhere in the Talbot Ave.-Morton St. stretch. That is the only piece of power source infrastructure they would pay for 100%...a real bargain compared to what it usually takes.
-- Rest of T's responsibility is just wires and poles. Clearances and whether bridges need to be modified...well, here's the official CAHSR guidelines based off Amtrak's NEC specs if you have an advanced electrical engineering degree and can read this exhaustive gibberish. It's all Greek to me.
Really not bad at all cost-wise given the tie-ins at both ends of a short 10-mile line. I doubt it tops $75M-$100M unless the engineering assessment of the 10 under-street and 3 under-footbridge structures start piling up as clearance problems that can't be solved by trackbed undercutting.
DMU's and EMU's don't need to be one or the other. As noted, you can shift the DMU fleet around to other diesel lines. Of which there are easily 4 or 5 routes ready-serve for 'em. And the driver for an EMU fleet is going to be Providence + RIDOT South County CR on the NEC, not Fairmount. The fleet scale of Providence, etc.'s 2020's decade needs dwarfs the xMU vehicle requirements for Fairmount. It's a rough, exaggerated analogue of New Haven Line vs. Shore Line East...SLE's share of the M8 fleet running 2-4 car consists on a modest schedule is a drop in the bucket vs. the 8-10 car consists that saturate the New Haven Line minutes apart. SLE just sips off the very tail end of Metro North's option orders. That's more or less what Fairmount would do if the T and RIDOT went all-in on an NEC pool order.
Keep in mind, the T is not going to be mass-purchasing DMU's or displacing the push-pull fleet. They're a terrible fit for all the 495-oriented lines that need the huge seating capacity of a 6 bi-level push-pull consist because their headways can never be tight enough, and the performance difference with wide stop spacing is not huge. It widens to meaningful levels only with tight stop density and the premium on fast boarding that comes with local/inner, clock-facing service. The T is not going back to the Budd days where Newburyport only ran 1 round trip today on a singlet or 2-car. Ridership in the 60's and 70's was a whole different universe. With the unit cost of DMU's being what they are, those are only for the targeted 128-turning local/neighborhood routes where 1-3 single-levels running frequently will do it. Different vehicles for different purposes.
If Fairmount gets wires and there's a pool EMU fleet, send them to Riverside-via-Worcester. If Riverside gets wires, send them to Reading or Waltham/128 via Fitchburg. Fairmount and Worcester are the only southside lines with projected frequencies dense enough to pay off the capital investment in wires. The northside is going to stay all-diesel until/unless the N-S Link forces the issue. And that'll be beyond the lifespan of a first DMU order. So if the vehicle market is sufficiently up-to-task for an order that'll return investment (note: today that's still iffy, so they're well-advised to be careful doing their homework and not hastily rush), go for it. They will always be have some line on the system where they're ideally fit even if they shift around. From Day 1 till the day those first vehicles get retired. Service obsolescence is not a concern at all.
------------------------
As for electrification of the Fairmount, as long as clearances are OK for 25 kV wires it shouldn't be that expensive. Here's how the NEC west-of-New Haven electrification works:
-- Large substations approx. every 30 miles. Currently located in Branford, New London, Warwick, and Sharon. All of them have future upgrade space to add equipment for capacity boosts when commuter rail uses the whole length of the Shoreline and most of MA/RI gets 3 wired tracks...as you can see from how empty the Sharon site is compared to, say, your average residential power substation like this one at Alewife.
-- Switching stations at phase breaks (i.e. the circuit breakers controlling stretches of overhead). Placed halfway between large substations in Westbrook, Richmond, and Norton (west side of tracks...that's a cell tower on the east side)
-- Small paralleling stations every 6 miles. Ones on the Providence Line are in Roxbury, Readville at the NEC/Fairmount junction, East Foxboro, Norton at the switching station, Attleboro, and Providence.
Amtrak's NEC Infrastructure Master Plan calls for a major substation to be added near Southampton to power the necessary SS expansion, Southampton expansion, tri- and quad-tracking inside 128, and commuter rail traffic...separating the power-hungry terminal end from Sharon. They would be paying for a majority of it since it's their terminal yard and driven as an Amtrak-first initiative, with the T chucking in proportional for commuter rail sharing. It is quite likely to be provisioned with lots of open expansion space like Sharon is, because all that was planned out pretty immaculately a decade in advance of the Acela.
-- Southampton is where Fairmount would tether off as its 'home' substation. The expandability of the site would support future Worcester electrification on the T's dime if they gradually added equipment to the substation. Again, majority fed/Amtrak funding on the initial build with T paying in for CR sharing and future expansion of the site.
-- The existing Readville site would be the anchor on the other end, since it's at the junction. Being at the midpoint between Southampton and Sharon substations, it would be upgraded to a combo switching and parallel station like Norton is. Amtrak would pay vast majority since switching station there is a requirement if they build anything at Southampton. Not a coincidence that the Readville one is placed in no-man's land between the junction...Amtrak had all these gradual expansion provisions immaculately planned 20 years ago.
-- 1 paralleling substation would have to be installed somewhere in the middle of the Fairmount somewhere in the Talbot Ave.-Morton St. stretch. That is the only piece of power source infrastructure they would pay for 100%...a real bargain compared to what it usually takes.
-- Rest of T's responsibility is just wires and poles. Clearances and whether bridges need to be modified...well, here's the official CAHSR guidelines based off Amtrak's NEC specs if you have an advanced electrical engineering degree and can read this exhaustive gibberish. It's all Greek to me.
Really not bad at all cost-wise given the tie-ins at both ends of a short 10-mile line. I doubt it tops $75M-$100M unless the engineering assessment of the 10 under-street and 3 under-footbridge structures start piling up as clearance problems that can't be solved by trackbed undercutting.
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