Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail
The reasons you don't have any extant rail E-W rail lines paralleling I-195. . .
- The Warren Branch out of Providence was carried over the Taunton River by the movable Slades Ferry Bridge, a lower-level road, upper-level rail bridge between Wilbur Ave. rotary in Somerset and Remington Ave. in FR (rail level abandoned 1938; demolished 1972). From Day 1 the bridge was extremely weight-restricted and too weak to carry early- 20th c. locomotive-pulled steel trains, so PRV-FR service only ran with gimp locos and wood coaches...then a short-haul electric commuter shuttle running wood EMU's under wires (basically, a glorified trolley interurban). All of the heavyweight intercity steam trains from New York that took all of NYC's richest to their Newport mansions had to go around-the-horn route instead: the ex- Amtrak Cape Codder route to Attleboro and downtown Taunton, then the Somerset Branch (basically the southern continuation of the Stoughton Line, crossing into Fall River on a drawbridge @ Mallard Point). And because the electric line ended at Fall River Depot it took a transfer to the Boston-originating north-south commuter trains to continue on to Newport.
When the Depression hit the Old Colony division hard and ridership on the commuter shuttle took a hit, they had no routes to consolidate all traffic to. So the electric Warren Branch got whacked because of that weak bridge that couldn't take any freight or non-shuttle passenger service. The freight between the RI state line and Somerset dried up too quickly for there to be any chance at landbanking, so it's only preserved in RI and completely one-million percent obliterated in Somerset.
- The Wattupa Branch runs E-W between downtown New Bedford and Plymouth Ave. in Fall River, where it stubs out. Still active today NB to the MA 88 underpass in Westport, landbanked by MassDOT late-80's in FR after one of the end-of-line mills burned down. Old Colony meant to infill the last half-mile gap to the mainline by the river, but never got around to it. Then I-195 came along in the 50's and the City Hall air rights in the 60's, with no side reservation provisioned for filling the gap. So there was never real rail service between Providence and New Bedford except for the existing around-the-horn route via Attleboro-Taunton because of this chintzy gap, and no rail service between FR and NB except for a dinky to Plymouth Ave. isolated from Fall River Depot and any other transit options.
- The Fairhaven Secondary and New Bedford main likewise stared at each other straight across the cove at separate loading docks with no foresight by the Old Colony to connect them. They probably could've done rail-with-road on the US 6 Popes Island bridge complex, with northern realignment of the Fairhaven Sec. from the Sconticut Neck Rd. grade crossing. But they let a couple generations of Popes Island crossing rebuilds come and go without ever acting on it, and let the abutting land on 6 get too built up to keep a future path open.
Consequently, you never had a means of consolidating enough traffic on one route to keep it all open through the mid-century decline. Providence-Fall River (direct, electric), Providence-Newport (indirect, steam), Providence-New Bedford, Providence-Cape Cod, and Fall River-New Bedford took FIVE different routings on five different schedules. With no real union stations collecting together these routes: the downtown Taunton station for the around-the-horn routes missed transfers to Boston, you had to walk across downtown to get between Fall River Depot and the FR-NB shuttle station, and frequencies from FR Depot to Taunton for transfers to NB and Cape were weak because most of the N-S traffic was Boston commuter trains that missed that particular Taunton station.
So you had the traffic profile of what should've been a major passenger and freight corridor Providence-Provincetown that: 1) should've retained trace passenger traffic until the same era (1958) that the 4 Boston commuter schedules lasted to FR/Newport, New Bedford, Hyannis via Middleboro, and Woods Hole via Middleboro; 2) should've retained trace seasonal intercity traffic into the Amtrak era and been one of the first modern (a la Cape Codder) revival routes picked back up; 3) should've been the primary freight route across the region keeping it all daily-active to the present. But there was never a contiguous corridor here...just this half-assed collection of parts that came oh-so-close but never connected because the Old Colony wasn't well-managed, especially during the 75 years to 1969 it was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the NYNH&H monopoly. The only fully contiguous E-W transportation route from Providence to the Cape for 300+ years from early colonial times to I-195's opening in 1955 was US 6. They were 98% of the way there on rail links but hemmed and hawed too long about the downtown Fall River gap and completely forgot about Popes Island. And that was that when the RR expansionary era came to a sudden halt in the 1929 market crash.
Did some very crude editing of the Old Colony system map on Wikipedia, with annotated legend of key lines.
Color code:
Purple = active passenger lines + SCR preferred alternative
Red = active freight/misc. lines
Maroon = converted to rapid transit (i.e. Ashmont/Mattapan)
Green = out-of-service non-abandoned lines
Yellow = abandoned, landbanked by state
Grey = abandoned, property lines extinguished
Dashed = line continues out-of-picture
This is what we started with, and ended up with in real life:
This is what we probably should've ended up with if just 3 itty-bitty things happened:
-- strengthen Slades Ferry Bridge
-- close Wattupa-FR Depot gap
-- close NB-Fairhaven gap
See
magenta for the South Coast-specific lines with two
green links for the gap-filler...and note the completely different slate of lines that would've been abandoned vs. kept. (Also threw in some other official passenger proposals in regular purple...but that's just extracurricular).
Oof!...that's just tragic. Could've consolidated everything at Fall River Depot as the union station for the whole South Coast where N-S Boston trains to Newport and New Bedford met E-W Providence-Cape and Amtrak Cape Codders. As well as the act as the freight crossroads for that region from the direct feed off the P&W main from East Providence. The straighter and somewhat more densely-populated Somerset Branch would've continued the Stoughton mainline, allowing abandonment of the branches through the empty Freetown State Forest. Consolidating the track miles and to just that crossroads at FR Depot + bare essentials probably would've allowed it all to survive the postwar crash and interruption in commuter rail service. Probably would've never completely lost service to Woods Hole because the ferries would've been that much more robust. Probably would've seen Amtrak come back to Cape Cod sooner than 1986, and stay there permanently. Probably would've never seen the Stoughton Line completely cut, meaning commuter rail by 1997 not 2297 and probably re-inaugurated service to Newport by 2010. Probably would be seeing RIDOT commuter rail back to Newport in quick succession after they get Woonsocket up in running...instead of never because the around-the-horn route is too indirect.
One thing you'll immediately notice is what bugfuck route duplication the Old Colony had all around its map. This is what they spent their capital on instead of fixing those chintzy little broken links that left us 3% shy of a complete and everlasting Providence-Hyannis corridor. It's a wonder they ever made it out of the 19th century solvent with such an easily distracted corporate attention span. But it's a goddamn travesty what didn't even survive the first half of the 20th c. because of those tiny links they brainfarted away.
