Why hasn't the Marine Park rail line been extended to Conley Terminal? Wouldn't this help make this terminal more successful? It always appears to be half empty of containers. I assume a rail would be limited by the reserve channel and bridge heights out of South Boston along Haul Road?
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Conley does not do nearly enough container volume to be a profitable major ship-to-rail spur. It's very small as container ports go: PANYNJ, Halifax, St. John's, Baltimore, Norfolk, etc. all dwarf it in size on the East Coast. And Boston was never big for containers since Day 1 of that being a thing, as Conley used to be split with Moran Terminal (current Boston Autoport) in Charlestown for handling them until Conley was massively renovated in the late-80's to consolidate sites. That's when street-running Conrail rail-access down E. 1st St. was abandoned; the loads its was taking from pre-optimized Conley were tiny and miscellaneous...not cubes like today. Today Conley cube carves out a niche as the 'tweener distance-wise between the NY/NJ and Maritimes ports where the recent modernizations Massport put in place make it sound economically for local trucking and more time-sensitive loading. But if you've ever been on the
Lake Shore Limited en route to Albany you've probably passed a CSX intermodal train out in the Berkshires before it's dropped some of its load at West Springfield Yard, carrying 150+ stacked cubes per train. At multiple trains per day. Volumes going into West Springfield and Worcester IM terminals on CSX absolutely dwarf what Conley is capable of.
Scale means everything in the IM business, and force-feeding Conley into the rail network for the sake of a *small*-share traffic reduction on 93 won't make anyone a profit margin. It would have to be subsidized heavily by Massport to draw interest from the likes of CSX. And it can't take double-stacked containers at all because the port is physically too small for sorting space so the second-stack cube can be properly plopped onto the first-stack cube in the correct order of destination & delivery. You need utterly massive facilities for that. Staten Island's container port--one of PANYNJ's
smaller annexes--is so silly-bigger than Conley it's impossible to see how that type of cube sorting activity could be staged here. Single-stack TOFC would have to be hauled out west to Framingham (CSX's main Eastern MA sorting yard for splitting/blocking cars) in multiple daily installments to distribute, which clobbers the economics. And then where are they going from there??? Not out-of-region to the Great Lakes region or far Northern New England...that's closer to the big ports. Not
incoming to be loaded on ships, as this isn't a producer region; international outbounds load up in volume elsewhere. Most of it is purely local-destination loads. To try to do that with rail you'll be running the Framingham sorting conveyor belt at cost chew...then making 1 extra revenue-siphoning stop to the IM terminals at Worcester or West Springfield to plunk it on the truck. A truck that's going to make exactly the same 50-100 mile round-trip inside of a day shift as it's making out of Conley...only starting from a different end of the state.
No one sees any margins in that. It is quite literally only a possibility if the state sees enough I-93 truck volume reductions to see fit to massively subsidize the entirety of the 'zero-calorie' extra handoffs required to ship out by rail in multiple steps...because the terminal is too small and compact to do that space-intensive sorting onsite. Big rigs are an absolute nothingburger share of total 93 traffic, so the traffic-taming rationale practically doesn't exist. 99.99% of our local highway traffic problem is a not-enough-transit problem, not a too-much-trucking problem. Plus the whole rationale of making the (very successful) Haul Road in the first place was based on whisking those trucks onto I-93 devoid of any impact to local streets. If anything the haul network should be
expanded by bringing the 93 Frontage Roads down further to Columbia Rd. to accentuate the positive distribution effects to more of the street grid (instead of proposing more pants-on-head stupid 93 HOV capacity grabs into the CBD).
Moreover, the sources of our IM rail loads are way wider-spread than just Class I carrier CSX on the B&A and Class I carrier Norfolk Southern on the Patriot Corridor (Class I's being the 8 largest continental freight RR's by volume, separated into more or less 1-on-1 intra-regional Class I competition and great pile-ups of most/all of the Class I's at major converging points). The great big Albany hub both those pipes branch off of also features Canadian Pacific RR, and the great big Montreal hub that the Maritimes' ports feed has CP and Canadian National duking it out for supremacy. The touches outside our borders to within includes a complex and ever-changing web of carrier alliances in all 6 New England states including Pan Am (the independent Ayer-Bangor portion system apart from the 50/50 Norfolk Southern- co-owned Patriot Corridor), Providence & Worcester, New England Central, Vermont Rail System, Central Maine & Quebec, St. Lawrence & Atlantic, and J.D. Irving Lines/New Brunswick Southern. To say nothing of all the trucking alliances that change by the day (and have so benefitted the state's revenues as more last-mile shippers move to Worcester County). Plus, we're arguably as heavily
indirect-influenced by North American's other Class I's--Union Pacific, BNSF, Kansas City Southern, and Ferromex--thousands of miles away than we are by
any local forces because of how the likes of CSX and NS slug it out on their primary Midwest to the East Coast/Canada routes from interchanges with those other massive carriers. The scale is mind-boggling deep, and the benefits MassDOT realizes from encouraging that Worcester County entrenchment out of Albany basically grabs the live-wire in economic rejuvenation because of how it ties into that extremely dynamic web of scale.
In contrast, only CSX has rights into Conley...nobody else. And because of the extra sorting steps and majority local-destination cargo, only CSX is going to be touching it before it leaves by truck in Worcester or West Springfield. None of the network "live-wire" scale effects are being engaged from that routing, and CSX has to charge a busywork premium for the extra steps that has to be a state writeoff if it's going to work with any of the IM truck carriers out there who are already geared to hyper-competition via scale. It doesn't work; it's a wholly artificial creation requiring that subsidy. Now, if our truck traffic problems in the CBD were way worse you could say that subsidizing the extra rail handoffs is a price worth paying. But it's not enough of a problem, and not worth paying; Haul Road is great at what it does and 93's universe of problems are completely other-worldly to its rounding-error's share of big righ traffic. So the motivation isn't there.
Now...IF anything changes in the deep future it's not hard at all to spur new rail off of Track 61, install a trestle off to the side of Summer St. Bridge, and go into the terminal on slack reservation set aside for that purpose. All bets are covered there on 50-year considerations. But there's no "Why not?" rationale for doing it sooner when the shipping economics are what they are. Marine Terminal rail, on the other hand, Massport envisions for some specialty niches like refrigerated perishables that do have time sensitivity in travel and do have decent enough originating loads out of Boston for distribution at rail distances. It's not intermodal, and is very niche...but it fills a small gap at Port of Boston that New York has seized upon with Hunt's Point Market rail access. That's different. The rail stuff at Everett Terminal--produce perishables, road salt, scrap, and future miscellany--are different. Quincy Shipyard (the daily Deer Island "poop train") is different. Future rail considerations in Charlestown (not the autoport...there's already massive rail autoports in Brookfield on CSX and Ayer on NS) are different. Future rail considerations in East Boston/Chelsea River (fuel mixing) are different. The Massport port portfolio present and future is basically one of well-optimized niches. And that explains why Conley is what is is, and isn't what it isn't.
