The press release states "The project team expects 70 minutes between trains on weekdays."
Depends on how peak-oriented you want the service to be. Multiple outbounds or multiple inbounds can ride each other's taillights at basically 5 minute frequencies, but once you start introducing opposite-direction meets it gaps out in a hurry. If the goal is to have something regular going in each direction you hit a very hard cap at about today's service levels. They do a very precarious dispatching mix of ride-the-taillights for multiple branches before switching to the opposite direction, and it doesn't allow for very full reverse-peaks.
Holy shit, they actually decided to do this!
Do you think they'll skip a NB trip on Friday evenings to do the Cape Flyer?
With how far away Bourne is for how sparsely populated the communities are would there be the track capacity and feasibility to run service only as far as Braintree for a future improved Red Line or cross-platform at the center island transfer? On the Cape Flyer schedule that’d be 69min to Braintree + 25-30min on the Red Line or Commuter Rail which puts it in line with a local Worcester or Fitchburg. Not sure if this has already been discussed extensively
The Buzzards Bay CR Feasibility Study concluded that a couple of Middleboro Branch passing sidings would need to be lengthened and that another couple would need to be added to extend an equivalent of today's Middleboro/Lakeville schedules to Buzzards Bay. If you're increasing service levels beyond that to include a new service branch, you'd need a lot more siding work on top of that.
I really have no idea. Based on ridership predictions, I would guess that it would be a Fall River train that gets dropped, rather than a New Bedford one.
I think there would be more of Friday/weekend rush for New Bedford than Fall River. Areas surrounding New Bedford have more of a "summering" population than Fall River, as well as the ferries to Martha's Vineyard/Nantucket/even cuttyhunk.
That makes sense. Could you have one or more shuttles meet the train in Middleboro? They'd have to meet it at the Lakeville platform I assume. Ugh, I hope they don't make the Flyer a two-seat ride instead, which is entirely possible. It's slow enough as it is, and with all those people bringing bikes having to transfer...
Usually, I don't like it when stations are named after roads or highways, but Kings Highway would've been a cool and somewhat unique name for a station. I wish they had never changed the name to Church Street, that's pretty much the worst name they could've chosen.
Too Maryland/Virginia for me. Leave the Kings/Queens to states that had landed gentry.
Kings Highway was what they were calling it in the 2013 FEIR for Phase II. Logical because it would've matched the namesake of the nearest MA 140 exit. Who knows what they were thinking with the Church St. changeover.
There were landed gentry in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they just were not as prevalent as their southern brethren.
This is splitting hairs somewhat over what "landed gentry" really means. New England was primarily comprised of port cities with mercantile interests and settled by Calvinists with a very different economic structure and work ethic than other states further south. Moreover, the poor soil meant large farming estates were impossible. Sure, there were wealthy people who owned more land than average, but you're mostly thinking of the farm-estates in places like Dover that became the summer and winter escapes for Brahmin families in the 19th century into the present day. But that was all a post-hoc constructed idea of how wealthy people ought to be--owning land in the country and maybe having some farming. So while technically yes, people like the Websters, Saltonstalls, Ameses, and others commanded large tracts of land, they were not really "landed gentry" in the true meaning of deriving their family's main income from agriculture rather than industry, trade, or shipping.
No, I am actually talking about the New England families who ran plantations -- in New England. They had large land holdings the used enslaved labor to crop the land. They also often had additional plantation holdings in the Caribbean (often Antigua) -- which they supplied from crops grown in New England* (as well as the other huge food source, salted cod). Some of the coastal plain areas were pretty rich farm land (not much of MA is).