F-Line to Dudley
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Except there's precedent there. The Greenbush Line had a very similar long swamp embankment in Scituate that was abandoned the same year (1960) as the Stoughton Line through Hock Swamp, and the Corps was absolutely fine with that one being re-used when the line was being restored from 2005-07. The most glaring thing from the South Coast Rail FEIR was that they gave absolutely no explanation for why the $50M swamp trestle was needed, and gave absolutely no explanation for why the trestle had to be single and not double-track. It was like one line in the report, and they just said it must be so. So there's two problems there....they didn't explain why they reversed precedent so soon, and they didn't explain hardly anything in general. That's where the pushback needs to be. The Corps arguably didn't satisfy a basic standard of documentation for their decisions. Same goes for why there's so much single-tracking where the swamp is not. You could *conceivably* get by running real :30 Regional Rail mainline service levels with Hock Swamp-proper being restricted to single track so long as the rest of the mainline to Myricks Jct. was DT, but we're left with that humongous gap throughout Easton and smaller gap in Raynham that don't need to be nearly as large as they are. And the Corps provided no documentation for why that must be so...they just decreed that it must be so.
That brings in the electrification canard. That has nothing to do with environmental issues, and everything to do with just how brittle the meets are going to be on all that single-track. The Phase II service plan was to have all peak Fall River trains express past Easton Village, Raynham, Downtown Taunton, and East Taunton to make time for meets with peak New Bedford trains that were all going to express past Canton Jct., Canton Center, and Stoughton. Bona fide service loss for the existing Stoughton Branch, and way sub- Regional Rail service throughout the mainline (if the peak is expanding to all-day, basically no one except North Easton Station gets adequate service levels). And despite all that expressing the peak express vs. off-peak local travel times only varied by about 2 minutes. Where does all the express time savings get lost en route?...at long pauses on passing sidings. To even make that hack-a-thon work, they had to search for a 5% reduction from the best a diesel push-pull schedule could muster...because on existing equipment the meets would be such a total clusterfuck that there was basically no hope of ever running things on-time. Enter electrification as an ass-covering measure. Any electric vehicle could cover the 5% deficit for idealized meets, so the Corps required the whole works to be electrified. Just said it must be so, no documentation as to why. Pay no attention to the fact that stock EMU's achieve a reliable 15-18% reduction in schedules from diesel P-P. 15% would've changed the meet points and created a whole slew of new single-track conflicts, so they went with an overly conservative 5% (which is kind of wimpy even for electric push-pull) because that was the one figure that would make the Corps' preordained single-track layout work on meets. In theory. If we actually adopt EMU's, we'd still see no more than 5% savings because the meets would have to be in exactly the same place to work at all. Total brokenness.
The 2013 FEIR is a hilariously (though not in a funny way) bad document. It's negligent work. It's full of holes. It has a service plan that flat-out doesn't work in the real world. It has to be burned to the ground and started anew, and held to a whole different standard of proof because the Corps abandoned its vision of producing an authoritative document that you could actually build something from. It's much more deeply flawed at way many more levels than "Why a trestle and not an embankment?"
