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

Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

What a joke. Leading the public on.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Scalziand said:
A while ago I was trying to think of ways to use the Old Colony Line without sacrificing a downtown Taunton station. Naturally, the result is CTP worthy.

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.977...m1!4b1!4m2!6m1!1s12tk4Im2D_H06OjF8BjLoeb7931w
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It's such a ridiculous pork barrel project it's not even funny. Billions of dollars to get 100 people on a 90 minute train ride to Boston... There's just SO MANY better ways to spend this money. If they have to pretend that every part of the state is equal and pander to the rural and hinterland voters, then establish better intercity transit on the South Coast. Connect it to Providence. Fund the schools. Do SOMETHING. You don't get to just say "oh, this city doesn't have a rail connexion to Boston, let's build one and everything will change! Isn't all rail transit great?"
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

It became "billions" of dollars due to the constant delaying of the project and nutty
requirements like "electric" locomotive stance of the Army Corp plus the things like the needless five mile trestle through the Hock. I could go on and on since following it since the early-mid Nineties.

And as far as ridership goes, stop harping on the endpoint of the lines. Tired of this
red herring being thrown out time and time again. The initial meat of the ridership will be Taunton-Raynham-Easton (though the later two would never admit it).

I guess its okay to pander to the interior RT495/Boston area and ignore the rest of
Southeastern Mass or beyond Worcester. I suppose the new "Wachusett Extension"
should be reviled as SOCO Rail is because the ridership might be on par with NB/FR. Yet
$55 million was just spent that largely helps Pan Am more than it does the MBTA.

In the end, maybe no more new projects should be built, kill the DMU/EMU fantasies, until
the current commuter rail system is brought up to snuff. This slow motion implosion of equipment and physical plant issues are difficult to watch.

D
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

The billions would be better spent on removing the single-track pinch from the Old Colony (call that $1b) which immediately gets you:
- lots and lots of service to Middleboro for park-and-ride and buses that can fan out across the whole of the South Coast
- a great way to then incrementally extend south or branch southwest.(where we can roll it out through a series of $300m extensions as ridership demands.

It isn't that we've "forgotten" the South Coast, it is that the South Coast happens to have (1) few natural demand concentration points and (2) as much or more in common with Providence than Boston

Which makes it hard to show actual daily ridership.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

GP40MC, one-stop extensions are a different matter than building whole new lines. Our genius former governor wanted a commuter to Springfield, too: that's idiotic.

Nobody is arguing to "forget the South Coast", but that projects should aim to benefit the greatest numbers of people per dollar spent. And, the entire state economy runs on Boston, like it or not... more money taken from there through taxes means more money dispersed back to the rest of the state.

This is like a microcosm of the way Amtrak MUST have lines running through all states, so we waste millions on trains nobody rides in Nebraska and Kansas while the northeastern rails crumble. The sad thing is that just like SCR, this spends government money that benefits a small constituency (construction, maintenance workers) but does little to nothing to otherwise grow the local economies for the people in those areas. There's no red herring here; projected ridership for the entire project is 4500 (or almost $0.5million per new ridership, and that's from the parties interested in pursuing the project and painting the rosiest picture possible. Cost per rider of the Wachusett (as originally planned at 55 million/400 new riders is $137k. GLX even at the egregious 3 billion tag still spends only 57k/new rider. Big difference. As I said in the initial post, if the money is to be spent on the South Coast, spend it on things that benefit the most people possible, help the local economy the most... Not just say, "Hey, transit for everyone is always good in every case!" This isn't it.

I waited for the Orange Line for half an hour at 8:30 AM today – yes, getting what the T actually has now working properly should be the first order of business as well, but expansion projects in the future should follow utilitarian principles. Unfortunately, politics means that will never happen.
 
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Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

As a railroad employee for 35+ years commuting from the hinterland here in Greater New Bedford, I can only say I've watched RT 140/RT 24 go from a sleepy highway to a busy,
congested mess at times (no so much RT140). So much for Providence.

I am sure there will be no problem with the Army Corp or abutting communities to add a lane to the entire length of RT24 again. So what if it abuts the southern end of the Hock!
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

GP40MC said:
As a railroad employee for 35+ years commuting from the hinterland here in Greater New Bedford, I can only say I've watched RT 140/RT 24 go from a sleepy highway to a busy,
congested mess at times (no so much RT140). So much for Providence.

I am sure there will be no problem with the Army Corp or abutting communities to add a lane to the entire length of RT24 again. So what if it abuts the southern end of the Hock!
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What are the best and most cost efficient solutions to traffic in this region? SCR isn't being foisted on the state because it beat out all other options after a through analysis... it's just because it's a "me too" project that gets people excited because it's as shiny as the Greenbush extension. Again, it would be nice if all government spending followed logic and sound analysis rather than what looks good.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

FK4 said:
What are the best and most cost efficient solutions to traffic in this region? SCR isn't being foisted on the state because it beat out all other options after a through analysis... it's just because it's a "me too" project that gets people excited because it's as shiny as the Greenbush extension. Again, it would be nice if all government spending followed logic and sound analysis rather than what looks good.
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Yeah. Nobody...absolutely nobody...tries to build a transit line arse-end first. The single most important thing before they even consider giving money to the cities is: "How you gonna get there from Boston?" And that from Day 1 of the current project incarnation has been an afterthought. This Middleboro Alternative BS is just the latest indication of how unserious the Task Force is, and the duplicity of the FCMB still trolling for votes by giving them a regular audience despite knowing damn well how unserious the plan is. No one's said a word about putting this through the GLX cost rationalization ringer for redesign...they just give them their 10 minutes every 2 months to give a threadbare PowerPoint presentation and fart unicorns in front of the board.

If they really wanted to touch this with some degree of problem-solving, Job #1 above all-else is challenging the Army Corps' fraudulent FEIR. Yes, I said fraudulent. Route 24 dumps more pollutants via runoff into that swamp in a single week than a diesel commuter rail line would in an entire year.

  • A Tier 3 emissions-compliant locomotive doing 79 MPH on arrow-straight track on flat land on the longest between-stops and between- grade-crossings distance on the whole route--all due to the swamp--is barely exerting any force at cruising speed. It's basically coasting along nearly as idle as if it were sitting at a station stop...only the emissions are dispersing quick at 79 MPH instead of hanging stationary midair over a platform.

  • The ROW is under a landbank...meaning that existing full 2-track embankment is still zoned for railroad. No one has ever been tasked with building a fucking mile-long causeway on pegs through a swamp because of new-construction upgrades to an active or reanimation of an inactive ROW in order to get up-to-spec with modern EPA regs. Proof of the Corps' bullshit lies in the Greenbush Line, which goes through just as much cumulative wetlands as the Stoughton Line on its de-abandoned segment south of Cohasset (several swamps rather than one large one). They were allowed to use the fully rail-graded embankment as-is without any of this causeway trestle horseshit, only needing to get derelict culverts and drainage up from 1960 to 2007 EPA regs. That part of the Greenbush construction was completely orthodox and fixed-cost, done no-surprises totally within budget (the scandalous NIMBY concessions were all in populated areas, not environmental). It would be no different with the Stoughton Line, but the Army Corps decided to arbitrarily poison-pill it.

  • The electric mandate is already bullshit for scheduling, and designed to paper-over how unachievable the schedule margins are. But the environmental justification is an 8-story mound of horseshit. Guess what...electric locos and EMU's can leak oil and coolant too! Just as much of it as a diesel! Just like any moving vehicle on the face of the earth needs lubricant and coolant to make powered wheels spin. The same oil and coolant leaks that runs off Route 24 into the swamp every goddamn day but maybe only springs a small leak on a trackbed at 79 MPH once a year. And they have this Jetson Shit super-absorbant substance called "plain old rock ballast" that holds the track up 1 ft. or more above ground level with graded sides specifically to trap small spills in-place for easy cleanup. If you don't have enough of it, you're not allowed to run at a 79 MPH track class. Hence, every single passenger route in the state has enough of it. Does Route 24 have a specifically absorbant surface? No...it has ground-level grass with occasional steep dropoff into wetlands wide open on the breakdown lanes.

  • Double-tracking has no effect on the environment because the goddamn ROW is already built-up on a double-track embankment. The only thing the single-track mandate does is whack the schedules so everything has to skip-stop and make long schedule-adjustment pauses at every station platform to compensate for the complete inability to handle train meets. It does nothing to physically limit the number of daily trains crossing the swamp...nothing whatsoever. The same NEC SW Corridor capacity that sets the limiter on Needham and Franklin schedules sets the schedule cap here. All the Corps done has crippled the meets to uselessness, not limited the daily slate of 79 MPH train movements through the swamp. De-crippled for functional meets the century-level cap is the same than the Franklin Line if it double-barreled Foxboro and Forge Park branches: 32 round trips per day, 16 per south-of-Taunton branch. Most likely contingent on Franklin vacating more NEC slots via Fairmount to give Stoughton more oxygen. But that's it...32 via the NEC and not one more without vulturing critical Providence slots that'll never be vultured. Did the Corps model the NEC at all when they were inventing pure bullflop about schedules through the swamp and crippling meets? No...the NEC is seldom-mentioned in the FEIR despite being the fucking first step for getting there from Boston.


This is fraud. And it hasn't been challenged. This is not the first time the Army Corps has submitted a defective-by-design FEIR to tank a project. They play politics all the time with picking winners and losers and swinging the biggest dick in the room for political capital's sake. They'll groove a softball to highway or rail projects they really like, completely torpedo others. They pulled this same shit with the I-384 fast-track extension in CT 12 years ago, with the same swamp BS poison-pilling it. All because they didn't like being told by the FTA what their priorities are.




The state can challenge this if they cared. It's a slew-footing of the FTA and any promised FTA funding commitments too. If they had pulled this shit with GLX you better believe both state and feds would've challenged it and won. It's as much a usurping of the federal Executive Branch as it is trolling the states; the FTA's relationship with the Corps is historically hostile and toxic in itself because of these chronic rogue power grabs, and many a generation of Transpo Secretaries get enraged when the FTA is make to look like fools by a Corps dealing in bad faith. It's very likely the Corps picked this project to torpedo because of how unserious the commitment is...because they don't believe there's any sack at the state level to challenge their obviously fraudulent FEIR...because the FTA knows it's a lost cause as presently constituted...and because it's basically a freebie for swinging their political capital dick around in a consequence-free environment.


But it's still fraudulent. And challenging the fraudulence is worth $1B in savings...instantaneously, before even putting it through a GLX cost eval gauntlet. If anyone cared about actually making this work...by actually caring about how one gets from Boston first...they would've thrown this FEIR right back in their faces and called for a do-over. Not a lot different from how contractor fraud got GLX to take a time-out for a do-over, only this time it's the Corps not a rogue corporation being pants-on-fire liars.


That they won't do this or even hint at it tells you all you need to know about the state-level commitment and the grift that the SCR Task Force continues perpetuating on the voting citizens of that region by pursuing this arse-end-first scam that has never gotten anything built on any other project. Fight the real enemy if this is still a thing that people actually want. "We're owed this because reasons" is just as much a denial of reality as the grift and indifference is at doing arse-end-first to the exclusion of "How you gonna get there from Boston?"
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Thanks F-Line....Not to mention the fact that MBTA Commuter Rail has no electric trains to begin with. Infrastructure support for it would add even more money to the project! And if anyone, including the folks down here in SE Mass, think the Middleboro option would, in the end be any cheaper, are disillusion.

D
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Another hypocritical fact I point to is the massive footprint of RT 495 between RT 24 and RT 95. We could build a four track mainline down the median, let alone the shoulders.
And all the wetland areas it crosses with no five mile bridge.

D
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

GP40MC said:
Another hypocritical fact I point to is the massive footprint of RT 495 between RT 24 and RT 95. We could build a four track mainline down the median, let alone the shoulders.
And all the wetland areas it crosses with no five mile bridge.

D
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Yeah can someone (ok, F-line obviously) briefly explain why doing Tanton-FR-NB 'in sequence' using the 495 median isn't a better option than doing FR & NB 'in parallel' as two legs of an open triangle? Might that have at least some advantages for frequency, scheduling, etc.?

Full disclaimer - i agree with a lot of you that there's no way that this should be a transit priority for the state, but if we ARE going to talk about, why is that routing not an option?
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

CSTH said:
Yeah can someone (ok, F-line obviously) briefly explain why doing Tanton-FR-NB 'in sequence' using the 495 median isn't a better option than doing FR & NB 'in parallel' as two legs of an open triangle? Might that have at least some advantages for frequency, scheduling, etc.?

Full disclaimer - i agree with a lot of you that there's no way that this should be a transit priority for the state, but if we ARE going to talk about, why is that routing not an option?
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You can do the FR & NB branches as a packaged pair, but there's no way anything gets built if you don't figure out the "How the hell you gonna get there from Boston first" part that the Task Force isn't even attempting to figure out...because it's not serious about building this after they've grifted all they can grift.

The Middleboro Alternative is not "How you gonna get from Boston?" It was eliminated way, way early on because it can't provide the frequencies or the schedule times, would cause punitive service cuts to the 3 existing branches, and pretty much preclude MUCH cheaper and more cost-effective Cape rail from ever happening at service levels worth a damn. It would also flat-out cost more to do the Savin Hall fix and wage a swath of destruction through downtown Quincy to get contiguous DT than doing the Stoughton alternative. Note how artfully they buried the lede on the initial M'boro Alt. announcement: it requires a $1B lane-widening of the entire SE Expressway as a project prereq. Now why in the hell would an asphalt cocaine bender be shotgunned in with a commuter rail project? Right...because the Greenbush and Plymouth Lines are BOTH going to get their frequencies utterly plundered to non-functioning uselessness by all the slots FR/NB has to outright steal to make that white elephant work.

The Army Corps FEIR...that fraudulent FEIR...didn't even waste paper calling the M'boro route D.O.A. So why are we chewing more scenery doing this rope-a-dope? Because there's more grift to be had from the same people who never intended to get this built.


It's simple. Challenge the fraudulent FEIR. The FTA will enthusiastically help them. $1B instantaneously disappears from the now-$3B total cost through shedding the electrification and the swamp causeway. Poof!...just like that. Double-tracking ends the insanity of whacking Stoughton's and Canton's service levels with skip-stop smoke and mirrors. Actually factor in the NEC needs (pretty much accounted for by Amtrak for its own service increases) and 128 station goes back on the board. Stop assuming Franklin schedules are an immovable object and enough slots can be comfortably carved out. 32 round-trip trains per day to Taunton...to-be subdivided at Phase II to 16 per branch with none of those BS 2-hour gaps or unidirectional-only peak schedules leaving zero reverse-commute options. That is the same number of round trips that Newburyport and Rockport split, and that Franklin and Foxboro would split. It's a little bit more than the 3-way Old Colony split that only doles out 12 each to M'boro, Plymouth, and Greenbush (in case you want further proof at how D.O.A. that "Alternative" is).


Get the shovels in ground here on the mainline after you've cut that bullshit and put it through GLX fat camp, and start moving onto the branch planning. Can you take what's an insta-reduction to $2B and find $500M more to chop in the whole package? Can you use the Taunton, then cities phasing to buy more time for bolts-tightening on the branches so long as you're solid enough on the mainline costs to start building? The FTA will probably up its likely commitment from $500M to $750M calling that "good enough", then it's a 50/50 split for $750M each on the total Phase I+II package. Is that so bad? All you did was toss out the bad actors and the pretzel logic that has consumed this project from the inside out and installed competent project managers who know you have to get from Boston first before you can get to FR & NB. It's not magic. Letting go can actually set 'ya free. It most certainly will put the South Coast closer to having real transit than persisting with this barely-transit fiction until the grift runs out and everybody cuts-and-runs. So why not give a shot at the thing that will deliver the original, non-perverted promise? There's nothing to lose by trying except maybe half the project cost.
 
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Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

FK4 said:
Connect it to Providence.
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Am I missing something, or is this the screamingly obvious elephant in the room that makes this project even more infuriating, when piled on top of all the other boondoggle-y [fraudulent] aspects

A commuter rail line that ran Downtown Providence--East Providence--Seekonk--Swansea--Fall River--New Bedford would be all of 28 miles to have to approve/permit/engineer/build/run/maintain. I can't speak to any of the environmental, sociocultural, geopolitical, and other quirks/nuances/oddities relative to such an initiative.

All I can say is that, in my mind's eye, these communities are obviously within the "natural" greater Providence economic hinterland, no?

If so, then why in the hell is their obvious linkage to that ecosystem being shunted (literally) in the completely bass-ackwards opposite direction? Am I just being too logical because this is all about politics?

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong--if there are binders full of statistics demonstrating Fall River/New Bedford is demonstrably "yoked" to Boston instead of Providence. I respect that matters of pride/prejudice/politics inevitably cloud the glass here. But still I'm curious...

Also, from a sheer infrastructure standpoint, I'm interested if the I-195 corridor happens to co-occupy a still extant ROW... or if it wasn't built along an old railbed. I've never looked out for evidence of that on the rare occasions I've driven east of Providence, but I'm certainly intrigued if it's the case.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

DBM said:
Also, from a sheer infrastructure standpoint, I'm interested if the I-195 corridor happens to co-occupy a still extant ROW... or if it wasn't built along an old railbed. I've never looked out for evidence of that on the rare occasions I've driven east of Providence, but I'm certainly intrigued if it's the case.
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If you play around with Google maps, you can find an old right of way extending west from New Bedford, less than a half mile north of I-195, then over near Fall River it crosses under and is south of the highway as they approach Watuppa Pond. It looks like I-195 and route 6 pretty much obliterated it on the causeway that crosses the pond. Then in Fall River you can see what looks like a rail trail for a while.

I don't know where it crossed the Taunton, and between Fall River and Providence I can't pick it up again on aerial view. Maybe 195 wiped it out; if so, there's a lot of median for much of the path. But I've seen that line shown on old maps, part of the Old Colony RR, perhaps.

I agree with you that FR and NB seem way more in the orbit of Providence, geographically and economically; I've never seen the traffic counts. I was involved once with a HUD-financed development in New Bedford, and the funding / inspection stream was from the Providence HUD office, rather than Boston, which was odd. Those days are over with the HUD office consolidation but there were other deals in the Fall River / New Bedford area that the Providence office ran. Hell of a lot shorter ride out there for them than it was for me.

ETA: here's a map of the Old Colony RR, shows this line:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Colony_Railroad#/media/File:OC1893.jpg

I think it was way farther to the West than I was looking: i believe the East Bay Bike Path through Barrington is the old ROW that fed Providence / Fall River.
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

The East Bay trail runs most of the way from east Providence to east Warren on the legacy ROW. The rest is abandoned/encroached/eaten by 195 through to Fall River. After Fall River, the legacy ROW reemerges and is still pretty much intact out to New Bedford.

("Minor" niggle- figuring out how to reconnect the NEC to the Providence tunnel without nuking that area of downtown)

Compare traffic on 24 vs 195 in this chart.
ftp://ctps.org/pub/CTPS_Map_Library/daily_traffic_volume_2005.pdf
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

Sorry, could've answered my own question last night quite quickly: if I'm interpreting this correctly then yes, Providence and New Bedford are officially in Providence's economic orbit primarily... then the greater Boston economic orbit secondarily, a dual designation/status since 2006:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence_metropolitan_area#Metropolitan_Statistical_Area

Incidentally, the Boston economic orbit/hinterland, as constituted by its CSA, extends 94 miles northwest (via I-93) to Laconia, NH; 115 miles southeast (via Rtes. 3, 6) to Provincetown; 95 miles southwest (via I-90, I-395, and Rte. 6) to Windham, CT; 58 miles northeast, to Portsmouth, NH (via I-95); and 79 miles west (via I-90, Rtes. 128, 2, and 32) to Petersham, MA. That's kind of a cursory/shorthand way to sketch out the perimeter, I suppose, but it's always neat to examine these geographies...
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

DBM said:
Sorry, could've answered my own question last night quite quickly: if I'm interpreting this correctly then yes, Providence and New Bedford are officially in Providence's economic orbit primarily... then the greater Boston economic orbit secondarily, a dual designation/status since 2006:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence_metropolitan_area#Metropolitan_Statistical_Area

Incidentally, the Boston economic orbit/hinterland, as constituted by its CSA, extends 94 miles northwest (via I-93) to Laconia, NH; 115 miles southeast (via Rtes. 3, 6) to Provincetown; 95 miles southwest (via I-90, I-395, and Rte. 6) to Windham, CT; 58 miles northeast, to Portsmouth, NH (via I-95); and 79 miles west (via I-90, Rtes. 128, 2, and 32) to Petersham, MA. That's kind of a cursory/shorthand way to sketch out the perimeter, I suppose, but it's always neat to examine these geographies...
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DBM -- Good Observation

However -- there is nothing what so ever that says each of the manifold cities and towns must be connected to Boston by the "utopian one seat ride"

For many reasons it makes a great deal more sense to create major sub hubs which are well connected to Boston with high frequency service. Thus if you are near to providence you take a local to Providence and then transfer to high speed high freq service to Boston

Similarly, lf you are near to Worcester, or Lowell you do the same to those subhubs

No rationale exits for spending what it takes to connect FR an NB directly to Boston for the hypothetical small number of commuters
 
Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail

whighlander said:
DBM -- Good Observation

However -- there is nothing what so ever that says each of the manifold cities and towns must be connected to Boston by the "utopian one seat ride"

For many reasons it makes a great deal more sense to create major sub hubs which are well connected to Boston with high frequency service. Thus if you are near to providence you take a local to Providence and then transfer to high speed high freq service to Boston

Similarly, lf you are near to Worcester, or Lowell you do the same to those subhubs

No rationale exits for spending what it takes to connect FR an NB directly to Boston for the hypothetical small number of commuters
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Well, yeah... that's why I argued a few posts above that it would make more sense to have a Providence--New Bedford commuter rail line, roughly traversing the I-195 corridor, versus the SCR proposal. Please revisit my earlier post and you'll see we're in agreement here, as far as I can tell.
 
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