Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail (South Coast Rail)

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Matthew said:
Check out the last few pages where it shows the proposed single and double tracking segments.

That's a lot of single tracking.
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Yes. Although at least they cluster the double tracking near the stations so they don't have to touch those and have another NIMBY fight when they come back to infill the double track later. All of the Taunton-north stops except Easton Village get built as double. Easton Vill. omitted because the historic station building is pain in ass to graft a full-high onto, so they're not touching that side of the ROW until they absolutely have to.

Taunton Depot, BTW, has to be tri-tracked if they want a full-high platform. Middleboro Secondary is a freight clearance route. Looks like CSX hit the Task Force with a rolled-up newspaper and said don't fuck with their business, because that's a late addition to the design that wasn't there in the prior engineering schematics for the station.

Although these geniuses still haven't considered that full-highs on the two branches are going to put a slight damper on Massport's plans to get some major ship-to-rail business out of the FR and NB ports after the shipping channels there get dredged and deepened. Both probably would've gained slightly better business prospects if they could ship wide-load freight, because right now Everett Terminal is the only port in the state that can do that. But alas...Freetown must get its candy, local industrial base and I-95 truck traffic be damned.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

There's also the no-build alternative of bus routes in that proposal, whould should serve to prime demand, as some on here have desired.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

They want the SCR to be electrified: http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news...includes_earmarks_for_south_station_gree.html

Straus and other South Coast lawmakers have pushed for completion of a commuter rail to Fall River and New Bedford, through Taunton, which the administration initially gave a $1.8 billion price tag when it sought to use diesel locomotives. An environmental review by the Army Corps of Engineers said the project should use more costly electrically wired trains, and the cost was increased by $400 million.

“That’s the number that the administration provided to us based on the completion of the Army Corps of Engineers environmental review,” Straus said.

Straus said the actual completion of South Coast Rail will depend on the next governor, and the Legislature will likely have done all the lawmaking needed to provide for the project by passing the bond bill.
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Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Scalziand said:
There's also the no-build alternative of bus routes in that proposal, whould should serve to prime demand, as some on here have desired.
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Buses make a whole lot more sense unless and until there is some real demand

The only demand is coming from the South Coast Reps and the real estate folks pedaling the properties down there.

The only worthwhile extension in that general direction to the rapidly developing complex at Gillette Stadium -- where when there is no game there is essentially unlimited parking
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Ridiculousness of SCR and how it's played out aside... could this actually be a good impetus towards electrifying the Comm Rail? It's something that should be done eventually any way, right?
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

underground said:
Ridiculousness of SCR and how it's played out aside... could this actually be a good impetus towards electrifying the Comm Rail? It's something that should be done eventually any way, right?
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No. Electrification only washes on the operating costs when you clear a certain threshold of trains per day, hour, whatever under that very set of wires. And 2 branches-off-a-branch 50 miles out of town is the last place on the entire system you're going to achieve that. Literally. Because this is the only service on the system that will split twice from its originating mainline. And that originating mainline is the NEC where every co-mingled Amtrak, Providence, past-Providence, and branchline train has wildly different schedules predicated on wildly different distances. Densest possible Taunton headways are not exactly going to make current Lowell riders green with envy, and the wires on the branches are going to be "lights are on but nobody's home" most hours.

That's the kind of monument to waste that'll Big Dig Syndrome the state into being gun-shy about electrifying anywhere else for years more. The constrained schedule on this build doesn't allow for a lot of additional headways over time. So if you place an initial electrics order to cover it, it doesn't have the momentum to push for supplemental orders to ever-increase the fleet. They're not going to place orders of +6-10 units at a time once a decade to patch for slow uptick. You need 2 insatiable growth lines like Providence + Worcester to fuel that kind of fleet expansion on a grand scale.

SCR's sort of like the Old Colony mainline: once you build it, you built it to near-capacity out the gate. And once you sink another half-billion dollars into building electrification here, you just ate the window of opportunity to do the same on Worcester or Lowell for another 2 decades. That doesn't end up weaning them off diesel at all. It makes them have to order yet another generation of diesels to satisfy that growth. Saturation-level Worcester schedule + Nashua will probably require more additional locomotives over the course of the next 15 years than Providence will need additional locomotives over the course of the next 15 years simply because of the service levels they're starting from. Throw in all the incremental growth on other lines...and when it comes time, which mode is going to need more bodies worse? And which mode's needs for more bodies are going to time better with vehicle procurement windows. Not the electrics that are more or less one-and-done at reaching their service levels. It'll be the diesels. More DMU purchases to reassign (but NOT displace) the push-pulls to these exploding regional-intercity growers, or simply more of anything/everything with an internal combustion engine. That's where the need is going to be and where the most resources will have to go. If that means gradual Providence growth leaves it 3 or 4 electrics shy with not enough extra cash to buy...oh well. Watch the diesels start creeping gradually into the SCR schedule while they peel a few of those units out to Providence to serve the greater need.


If electrification is going to spread here, it has to change the calculus of where the future fleet growth is headed. Doing this as an SCR gimmick does nothing whatsoever for that. Not only does it poach for decades all the money that could be put into converting another line that does change the momentum...but it also puts them on the hook for committing to another generation of diesels when the rest of the old fleet is overturned in the early 2020's. With 20-25 year vehicle lifespans. If they do start belatedly scratching together money to electrify a bigger chunk at the system it then comes at double-dip cost of buying all-new electric vehicles to replace a share of this HSP-46 fleet that today hasn't even been built yet. Go eat another few hundred mil in indirectly SCR-related senseless waste because they just had to get their trophy wires and get them now.



This project can only end in another Big Dig hangover.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

underground said:
Ridiculousness of SCR and how it's played out aside... could this actually be a good impetus towards electrifying the Comm Rail? It's something that should be done eventually any way, right?
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Ugrnd -- I could see Gillette Stadium to South Station as an electric destination with 15 min headways and a colossal bus complex fed by all the places South and West & East

Foxboro is well located on I-95, Rt-1 and not far from I-495

It is the obvious southern Nexus
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

whighlander said:
It is the obvious southern Nexus
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This has to be the most absurd post in this thread.

Mansfield would be a better "nexus" than Gillette.

At first glance, it appears the best south "nexus" would be the South Coast Rail Project's ROW at I-495/MA-138. Easy capture of the entire South Coast, including excess Middleboro overflow, Wareham and Buzzards Bay, New Bedford, Fall River, and certainly Taunton. You can capture them all, and everything in between, with express coach bus feeders. If this were done, I'd recommend relocating Middleboro to its traditional location closer to Middleboro's core, and sacrifice the parking for the 495 station instead.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

BostonUrbEx said:
This has to be the most absurd post in this thread.

Mansfield would be a better "nexus" than Gillette.

At first glance, it appears the best south "nexus" would be the South Coast Rail Project's ROW at I-495/MA-138. Easy capture of the entire South Coast, including excess Middleboro overflow, Wareham and Buzzards Bay, New Bedford, Fall River, and certainly Taunton. You can capture them all, and everything in between, with express coach bus feeders. If this were done, I'd recommend relocating Middleboro to its traditional location closer to Middleboro's core, and sacrifice the parking for the 495 station instead.
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No...you can't. You simply can't cram enough trains down the NEC to Canton to make Taunton a super-node. Because no matter how big a super-node you envision Taunton, Providence will always be the superduper-node outranking it by several orders of magnitude. For "overflow" Cape runs the Stoughton route can work in-season for a couple of expresses. Say, Canton-Taunton Depot-Middleboro and skipping everything else. But only as overflow like a 2nd simultaneous 5:00 getaway on those packed summer Fri. afternoons. And only as an express skipping most stops. There aren't enough slots available on the Stoughton to do much more than that, and the Old Colony to Middleboro is considerably faster so the only way to approximate the same schedule via Stoughton is to skip nearly all the intermediates.

Relief valve for summer crush load, not "super-node". There still will come a day when the Old Colony pinch in Dorchester must be reckoned with to serve all of SE Mass's growth. And the Randolph Branch is long, long gone and built over so there is no physical way to chain those two mainlines together for load-balancing.



As for Foxboro...probably the last place on the southside that is likely to see wires or DMU's. Franklin-via-Walpole is the designated wide-clearance freight route into Boston. High platforms are prohibited at all stops except Readville and Walpole where the freights are on turnouts. Not enough room for passing tracks. The T is considering purchasing level-boarding only DMU's with this first purchase, which pretty much bans them from Franklin which only has front-door boarding mini-highs (theoretically possible to use with DMU's, but way too-slow boarding to ever bother).

With Worcester being purged of most freight and having too many overhead bridges inbound, Franklin is also the last and best corridor for double-stack freight to Boston should that ever be necessary (unlikely...but we're talking 50-year considerations beyond the range of prediction). Or for just purging the Worcester Line of even more freight traffic east-of-Westborough to string up the wires and raise the platforms. Hooking the Franklin back to the high-clearance P&W mainline in Blackstone and hashing out usage rights for CSX to express down the P&W from Worcester-Blackstone-Walpole lets them reach reach Readville, the yards in Framingham and their Leominster local with only a single crossing of the Worcester Line, and anywhere else they currently serve. With only a handful of bridges to raise should there ever be a need to bring super-tall loads to 128. I think MassDOT would be very hesitant to put wires on the Franklin or Framingham Secondary and cripple those future considerations for how much they allow Worcester to reach for another gear. And CSX will never ever allow its wide clearances here to get borked by high platforms; the T would get overruled in a heartbeat by the FRA if they complained. We're lucky they were willing to abdicate that clearance preemption on the inner Worcester Line in the Beacon Park deal.

If there are any southside lines that have to forever remain diesel and low-platform, Franklin, Foxboro, and the P&W Providence-Woonsocket-Worcester route are it. Even Westborough-Worcester has few enough bridges, enough bridges where simple track undercutting fits all underneath, and room for 3 tracks bypassing high platforms to let the supertalls and wide-loads coexist seamlessly with EMU's.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

There's $250 million in the latest Capital Improvement Program for "preliminary engineering" on South Coast Rail...

Comment period is until Feb 14th -- Scott.hamwey@state.ma.us

Good time to write in and, if nothing else, tell MassDOT to cancel this boondoggle before we blow any more money on it.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

What's $250M when you've already spent well over $100M to-date on the pre-pre-preliminary stuff? You know...like kickbacks.:rolleyes:
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Holy crap, you mean Bristol County may actually get some investment dollars from the state instead of paying for the Boston Metro's infrastructure and never getting any benefit? Well image my surprise.

Most of the opponents of the South Coast Rail tend to be the white collar elites in Suffolk and Middlesex County that forget the state of Massachusetts extends beyond 495. They look down on New Bedford and Fall River as an undesirable part of the state, not nearly as important as the wealthy suburbs of Boston. It's their state actually, we're just lucky enough to be part of it.

...

My general anger towards the Boston Metro elites aside, this investment represents a huge opportunity for all three majors cities to finally be able to attract the higher income workers from the city with the more affordable cost of living. Young profressionals who want the benefits of city living with the costs of not being in the immediate metro will find NB an attractive opportunity. New Bedford is slowly getting back on track in recent years and this will significantly help these efforts by attracting the people needed to continue the trend.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

South Coast Rail isn't the right investment. It's $2 billion, and it's not going to work. It's an hour-and-a-half trip and the frequencies are sabotaged by single-track running.

What the South Coast needs is investment in its local transit to create a separate city region economy. It's too far from Boston to be a bedroom community, and you should aspire to better.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Matthew said:
South Coast Rail isn't the right investment. It's $2 billion, and it's not going to work. It's an hour-and-a-half trip and the frequencies are sabotaged by single-track running.

What the South Coast needs is investment in its local transit to create a separate city region economy. It's too far from Boston to be a bedroom community, and you should aspire to better.
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The commuter rail serves plenty of none-bedroom communities, I hardly consider Providence, Lowell, Worcester, and Plymouth to be Boston's bedroom communities yet they are all connected via commuter rail. No one has the opposition to these lines because for some reason only New Bedford and Fall River are a waste of money.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Whether or not Bristol Co needs or deserves SCR, sum total tax dollars flow out of Metro Boston, not into.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

OSUPhantom said:
Holy crap, you mean Bristol County may actually get some investment dollars from the state instead of paying for the Boston Metro's infrastructure and never getting any benefit? Well image my surprise.

Most of the opponents of the South Coast Rail tend to be the white collar elites in Suffolk and Middlesex County that forget the state of Massachusetts extends beyond 495. They look down on New Bedford and Fall River as an undesirable part of the state, not nearly as important as the wealthy suburbs of Boston. It's their state actually, we're just lucky enough to be part of it.

...

My general anger towards the Boston Metro elites aside, this investment represents a huge opportunity for all three majors cities to finally be able to attract the higher income workers from the city with the more affordable cost of living. Young profressionals who want the benefits of city living with the costs of not being in the immediate metro will find NB an attractive opportunity. New Bedford is slowly getting back on track in recent years and this will significantly help these efforts by attracting the people needed to continue the trend.
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How? The service plan doesn't allow enough peak-hour schedule slots from either city to serve up meaningful enough ridership for how long the trip is. The single-track mainline north of Taunton kneecaps it, and that's why the ridership from the terminals keeps getting revised down, down, down. The bus to Taunton + train transfer offers better frequencies at equal travel time than the directs for people who do/want to work in Boston, and that constriction is not going to substantially open up a N-S jobs market in a region that's oriented E-W. And forget about it for reverse-commutes if the trip times and frequencies are that lousy.

The build is defective by design until it has the capacity to offer service as frequent as any other branched commuter rail line like the Old Colony. This is far well that.


I keep hearing all these purely qualitative arguments from proponents about how transformative it's going to be. I rarely if ever hear a quantitative argument of where the source of butts-in-seats and butts-into-city is going to come from. There's nothing economically stimulating about trains that run empty. And I've yet to hear an "if you build it, they will come" argument about why a crippled service plan stimulates interest. Because the forecast numbers don't show it. It won't until the Stoughton Line is double-tracked, and since that's already been cut from the base build it can't happen till some much later phase. So why is it so important to build it in a monolith to the endpoints TODAY for a useless service? These same arguments against phasing it Taunton + connecting bus, then FR/NB when they have the money to double-track and do it right are likewise all qualitative and waxing about stuff-of-dreams rather than providing a useful service and useful pipeline of people-and-their-money into the two cities.


You might as well volunteer to hazard an explanation for some of this, because none of the South Coast's leaders or the Gov.'s office are bothering to.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

There are plenty of reasonable arguments on both sides here. I does seem that there are a couple of structural problems: Single track in the Taunton-Stoughton stretch and the insistence on doing this as one giant build rather than phasing to Taunton first. Other problems - of which there are plenty - could get ironed out.
One idea for all of the South Coast communities to demonstrate their commitment to this would be to vote to join the MBTA district right now. The funds that they would have to cough up should be put into an escrow account to be used for construction only. This would also enable the state to shit-can the advisory committee and just move ahead with the goddam thing in a rational manner. Commit to a Old Colony style line and let any community with the desire upgrade from there with additional funds.
 
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