turnto10.com
Awesome news!MBTA secures final approval to launch South Coast Rail service
The Federal Railroad Administration has signed off on commuter rail service to Fall River and New Bedford.
FYI, I wasn't able to find any schedules of a Lakeville-Bridgewater shuttle on either MBTA's website or TransSee (which pulls GTFS data). It's most likely just ghost code.
This is incredibly catty of me to say, but I didn’t realize there was direct service from Church Street to Fall River.
That's quite the wack Zone progression right there. They got the endpoints right, but the gradations to that point are just awful and in dire need of a reboot.
Middleborough should probably be Zone 7, since there’s an abrupt jump from Zone 6 to 8 without a Zone 7 station. It would make sense to ease fares in Middleborough, considering how Middleborough/Lakeville was controversially closed.
Not just there. Campello gets hosed being in the same city as Brockton and Montello.
You’re right, I didn’t even realize that Campello isn’t the same zone as Brockton and Montello. That’s very odd.
When was the last time the MBTA re-zoned a station? I know that Forge Park went from zone 7 to zone 6 around the time it opened in 1988, but that was 37 years ago…
www.bostonglobe.com
South Coast Rail is great. It is also 30 years late. - The Boston Globe
The new commuter rail service to New Bedford and Fall River is worth celebrating. Still, the fact that it took so long, cost so much, and goes so slowly shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone.
Great take from the editorial board, imo.
newbedfordlight.org
Double-tracking the Old Colony Mainline through Dorchester, Quincy, and Braintree needs to happen.
They knew this was going to happen from Day 1 of selecting the M'boro Alternative, and buried it so nobody would ask questions. Old Colony dispatching was only designed from the beginning of the studies 30+ years ago for Middleboro, Kingston/Plymouth, and Greenbush to operate in perfect balance. OTP was pretty good overall because the lines all had level boarding and automatic doors keeping dwell variances low and because they were preferentially segregated to more-reliable equipment, but when something bad happens it always cascades in a hurry throughout the works and drags down all 3 branches at once. The OC lines were never designed to be weighed down on one appendage by a long-distance branch-of-a-branch operation. Certainly not with no mods to the track layout; even the proposed Buzzards Bay extension aimed to lengthen a couple passing sidings on the Middleboro Line (though obviously it couldn't touch the mainline) to keep things in balance for the somewhat longer schedule. Basic stochastic variability (i.e. random-chance probabilities that something won't time right) can bring the whole system to a screeching halt, even when it's not an *obvious* whopper like malfunctioning equipment. There were a couple spot signal issues yesterday--one on the New Bedford Branch and one in Quincy--but most of the delays were simply cascading for when the dominoes started to fall. I said it in this post last month...the East Taunton shuttles are over-padded on their layovers because they know internally that the OTP of the thru trains is gonna be shit on-the-regular for making the connections.Delays affect South Coast Rail on first day - The New Bedford Light
Welcome to the club: After decades hoping to join Massachusetts’ commuter rail network, New Bedford riders get their wish — along with 20-30 minute delays.
Double-tracking the Old Colony Mainline through Dorchester, Quincy, and Braintree needs to happen.
