F-Line to Dudley
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Re: Fall River/New Bedford Commuter Rail
Middleboro wouldn't qualify for Urban Rail 15-minute frequencies in an RER'ed universe anyway. It's way too far out of town. The organizing principle of RER is that 128-land* is the land of :15 frequencies, 495-land* is the land of :30 frequencies, and miscellany beyond* is probably hourly.
(*high-leverage and square-peg exceptions nonwithstanding)
So for the Old Colony with a fixed Dorchester-Quincy pinch you may see Urban Rail (or as close to it as they can achieve) frequencies terminating at Brockton, because despite being a ways beyond 128 that's a large city, high-leverage stop, and very large bus terminal for a high-frequency BAT system that could be generously expanded. And it also has a ready-made layover yard next to the downtown station in the form of the leads to the old freight yard. South of there it's not going to make sense to do more than :30 to Campello, Bridgewater, and Middleboro because the density drops off the table and the commute orientation swings harder to 9-5'er (excepting Bridgewater State, where :30 times better with the way classes are chunked out in 60-90-120-240 minute increments). Past Buzzards Bay to Hyannis is definitely in hourly territory.
For the other two branches, probably :30 tops because Plymouth has too-few multimodal connections on its Whitman-north stops, Greenbush is in similar boat Cohasset-west, and neither have potential mid-line layover sites for shift changes or resetting the clock except for Plymouth's Abington maintenance yard located inconveniently between stations.
There's no good alternative for FR/NB here because the manglement of Middleboro station by SCR Phase I prevents threading of :30 headways straight on to Taunton any which way. The pie that's divided in thirds at Braintree must be divided again at Pilgrim Jct...always and forever under this Alternative. If you subscribe to RER's basic organizing principle that :15 = 128 / :30 = 495 / 1:00 = past-495...there is zero shot at narrowing frequencies to the SCR cities to an hour via this alternative. Middleboro Station will vulture some, any notion of (half-assed frequency capped) Buzzards Bay or Cape service will vulture some more. It will not, and can not, fit the RER paradigm...ever. So we pivot back to Phase II, and the risk that the brokenness of Phase I will scuttle any attempt at a Phase II.
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Now, you can achieve all of this with a non-broken Stoughton route.
First task is doing what the FEIR didn't do: incorporate NEC improvements directly forced by SCR frequencies. That means putting a giddayup on the quad-tracking from Forest Hills to Readville, reaching yes/no decision on keeping Hyde Park (note: traffic conflicts in the 4-track design would be problematic), expanding 128 Station to 4 platform tracks, implementing the RER rec to take most Forge Park trains off the NEC and interline via Fairmount, and revamping Canton Jct. so the NEC side has an Amtrak passing track and all sides have full-length platforms that don't overspill the junction. Needham would be pushed one step closer to death's door on CR mode, but wouldn't need an immediate decision as a project prereq.
Next is taking on the single-tracking fiasco from the FEIR that forces impossibly tight meets and system-high risk of daily delays. The Army Corps of two Administrations ago made a political move to saddle it with requirements of the single-track swamp trestle + the electrification requirement...not because of air quality or speed, but because the single-track meets forced by their own decisions were so tight that the +1-2 minute difference in electric acceleration at those widely-spaced stops were the only thing that covered up how untenable the meets were. Scrap it. The same Corps from another Administration allowed recycling of the Greenbush Line's double-track embankment through a far more environmentally sensitive estuary in Scituate. The Corps is a notoriously political animal, and they made a pants-on-fire rigged decision here to stack the deck on a project that had little chance of fed funding. This is not as hard as it looks to defeat given that the leadership there has overturned multiple times, and the counterpoint offered by the Greenbush example.
Have full double-tracking on the Stoughton main and congestion abatement on the NEC, and you can get those :30 minute headways to Taunton. It'll get easier still if Needham gets expunged from the SW Corridor tunnel and it's just :30 Providence and :30 Taunton pairing off in orderly fashion around the Amtrak slots. If you can achieve :30 locals to Taunton, both reasonable with the fixes and also a reasonable upper limit for what you can cram down the NEC in a major Amtrak+Providence growth era, then you can guarantee hourly all-day both directions to each city. No routing hacks, no skip-stop hacks like on the brain-damaged FEIR, no train meets so brittle you can expect to stay stopped on the tracks for 10 minutes a day, no commute-direction only games, no gigantic midday service gaps, no mockeries of RER operating principles. And hourly is probably very right-sized given that rail-less east/west is the predominant commute direction on the South Coast vs. north/south. You might even be able to plug a couple unidirectional rush-hour supplemental slots on the otherwise displaced Phase I routing to run as time-shortening expresses, since those would be able to overtake the Middleboro locals if used judiciously.
If RER is the future, that's really the only way it can work. Unless Phase II is built with its primary fatal flaws corrected, every other possible way flunks the basic-most definition of RER and leaves SCR dragging the absolute rump of the whole system by a shocking margin on service levels...forever (even in a future NSRL universe). It's imperative that *something* be done to pick up that travesty of an FEIR, even if pushing paper is all they're willing to fund now because they shot their load on this Phase I inanity. What they're building looks bad enough amidst current lousy service levels. If they can't get it in line with RER--which is not possible with Phase I, with the broken Phase II in the FEIR, or with a Phase I that tanks ridership so no form of Phase II gets attempted--then we're taking on a multi-generational problem of bad transit.
Middleboro wouldn't qualify for Urban Rail 15-minute frequencies in an RER'ed universe anyway. It's way too far out of town. The organizing principle of RER is that 128-land* is the land of :15 frequencies, 495-land* is the land of :30 frequencies, and miscellany beyond* is probably hourly.
(*high-leverage and square-peg exceptions nonwithstanding)
So for the Old Colony with a fixed Dorchester-Quincy pinch you may see Urban Rail (or as close to it as they can achieve) frequencies terminating at Brockton, because despite being a ways beyond 128 that's a large city, high-leverage stop, and very large bus terminal for a high-frequency BAT system that could be generously expanded. And it also has a ready-made layover yard next to the downtown station in the form of the leads to the old freight yard. South of there it's not going to make sense to do more than :30 to Campello, Bridgewater, and Middleboro because the density drops off the table and the commute orientation swings harder to 9-5'er (excepting Bridgewater State, where :30 times better with the way classes are chunked out in 60-90-120-240 minute increments). Past Buzzards Bay to Hyannis is definitely in hourly territory.
For the other two branches, probably :30 tops because Plymouth has too-few multimodal connections on its Whitman-north stops, Greenbush is in similar boat Cohasset-west, and neither have potential mid-line layover sites for shift changes or resetting the clock except for Plymouth's Abington maintenance yard located inconveniently between stations.
There's no good alternative for FR/NB here because the manglement of Middleboro station by SCR Phase I prevents threading of :30 headways straight on to Taunton any which way. The pie that's divided in thirds at Braintree must be divided again at Pilgrim Jct...always and forever under this Alternative. If you subscribe to RER's basic organizing principle that :15 = 128 / :30 = 495 / 1:00 = past-495...there is zero shot at narrowing frequencies to the SCR cities to an hour via this alternative. Middleboro Station will vulture some, any notion of (half-assed frequency capped) Buzzards Bay or Cape service will vulture some more. It will not, and can not, fit the RER paradigm...ever. So we pivot back to Phase II, and the risk that the brokenness of Phase I will scuttle any attempt at a Phase II.
--------------------
Now, you can achieve all of this with a non-broken Stoughton route.
First task is doing what the FEIR didn't do: incorporate NEC improvements directly forced by SCR frequencies. That means putting a giddayup on the quad-tracking from Forest Hills to Readville, reaching yes/no decision on keeping Hyde Park (note: traffic conflicts in the 4-track design would be problematic), expanding 128 Station to 4 platform tracks, implementing the RER rec to take most Forge Park trains off the NEC and interline via Fairmount, and revamping Canton Jct. so the NEC side has an Amtrak passing track and all sides have full-length platforms that don't overspill the junction. Needham would be pushed one step closer to death's door on CR mode, but wouldn't need an immediate decision as a project prereq.
Next is taking on the single-tracking fiasco from the FEIR that forces impossibly tight meets and system-high risk of daily delays. The Army Corps of two Administrations ago made a political move to saddle it with requirements of the single-track swamp trestle + the electrification requirement...not because of air quality or speed, but because the single-track meets forced by their own decisions were so tight that the +1-2 minute difference in electric acceleration at those widely-spaced stops were the only thing that covered up how untenable the meets were. Scrap it. The same Corps from another Administration allowed recycling of the Greenbush Line's double-track embankment through a far more environmentally sensitive estuary in Scituate. The Corps is a notoriously political animal, and they made a pants-on-fire rigged decision here to stack the deck on a project that had little chance of fed funding. This is not as hard as it looks to defeat given that the leadership there has overturned multiple times, and the counterpoint offered by the Greenbush example.
Have full double-tracking on the Stoughton main and congestion abatement on the NEC, and you can get those :30 minute headways to Taunton. It'll get easier still if Needham gets expunged from the SW Corridor tunnel and it's just :30 Providence and :30 Taunton pairing off in orderly fashion around the Amtrak slots. If you can achieve :30 locals to Taunton, both reasonable with the fixes and also a reasonable upper limit for what you can cram down the NEC in a major Amtrak+Providence growth era, then you can guarantee hourly all-day both directions to each city. No routing hacks, no skip-stop hacks like on the brain-damaged FEIR, no train meets so brittle you can expect to stay stopped on the tracks for 10 minutes a day, no commute-direction only games, no gigantic midday service gaps, no mockeries of RER operating principles. And hourly is probably very right-sized given that rail-less east/west is the predominant commute direction on the South Coast vs. north/south. You might even be able to plug a couple unidirectional rush-hour supplemental slots on the otherwise displaced Phase I routing to run as time-shortening expresses, since those would be able to overtake the Middleboro locals if used judiciously.
If RER is the future, that's really the only way it can work. Unless Phase II is built with its primary fatal flaws corrected, every other possible way flunks the basic-most definition of RER and leaves SCR dragging the absolute rump of the whole system by a shocking margin on service levels...forever (even in a future NSRL universe). It's imperative that *something* be done to pick up that travesty of an FEIR, even if pushing paper is all they're willing to fund now because they shot their load on this Phase I inanity. What they're building looks bad enough amidst current lousy service levels. If they can't get it in line with RER--which is not possible with Phase I, with the broken Phase II in the FEIR, or with a Phase I that tanks ridership so no form of Phase II gets attempted--then we're taking on a multi-generational problem of bad transit.
