I know that thats what NEEDS to happen and I know blue-Lynn has many more benefits and is the line we ultimately need. I wasnt saying do DMU’s in place of BLX. We both know how this actually plays out. If red-blue is projected for 2040 blue to Lynn is probably 2060. DMU’s obviously arent the ideal solution, but in all honesty its probably the only option that we would realistically do, for now. Transit projects take decades and only come around one at a time. It may not be perfect, but Id much rather have that than nothing. Fairmount as of now only has the DMU option there is not even a real electrification plan yet. The Fairmount DMU plan has atleast been looked into. Its the same with West station and when there is its an entirely separate project with separate funding and construction. That is until the commuter rail network is electrified, again probably 60 years out. So if we were to use DMU’s on fairmount I think it could be a great stop gap to get rapid transit via DMU’s from North Station to Lynn, Chelsea...etc soon.
We could get North Station Dmu’s running in 10 years. That would give these lines an option until the permanent solutions were implemented. The DMU market is cool in the US, but if we were in on it we could do something like what we did with the new red/green/orange cars. In the case of Waltham, Chelsea there are no other plans, yet. I think this would be the most reasonable way to drastically increase rapid transit until they can be replaced by permanent solutions. I know its going to be shit on because of x, y, z, but what better solutions are there right now that could get all of these lines running at the same time this quickly? Just build it all is great, but its not happening currently. DMU’s were at least being explored and can be added to all these different existing commuter rail lines, where the permanent solution means each of these are their own individual massive projects. I think its a completely reasonable idea that at least deserves consideration to see if it could be done. If it can Id say go for it while we wait around for the rest of the expansion to take place.
1.
"2040" for Red-Blue ≠ "2060" for BLX as if that were some locked-in sequence. Sec. Pollack just requested like a week ago to put Red-Blue back on the CIP, and the Focus40 document was the nearest/easiest available mechanism to do that with. That was merely the first step (a refreshed scoping study being the second) for getting a not-terribly-complex project put back on the fast-track. It does not follow that every additional project must single-file in line 20 years behind that 2040 placeholder. The bureaucratic meaning of "2040" was discussed extensively in the Red-Blue thread.
Pollack has also said throughout her tenure that the agency has to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time in all facets. We're starting to see the fruits of that in her second term with all these simultaneously moving modernization studies for closing the state-of-repair gap. The move to get Red-Blue and GLX-Route 16 back on the front-burner is the embryonic sign of a pivot towards getting expansion projects back in the queue without needing the whole earth to stop in the process. It's agonizingly slow and fraught with bureaucracy, but you can't say "you know" how this plays out for 60 years in the future when it's already playing out in baby steps no one could've predicted just 3 short years in the aftermath of our big Olympics whiff. Change isn't pretty to watch and momentum is slow to build, but something has clearly shifted in response to the region's mobility crisis.
2.
Urban Rail ≠ DMU. Always keep that in mind, because "The vehicle IS the service" fallacy is the very deke the T already used once to punt off Fairmount Line service increases when it canceled its DMU Request for Proposals and subsequently left service levels untouched. The vehicle type doesn't matter for implementing all-day bidirectional headways of 15-20 mins. Push-pull ends up chewing unfavorable costs projected over years because it's less ops-efficient, but it is not a capability drag for Urban Rail service starts as long as the train sizes are kept well-managed. Lines with infrastructure that's up-to-snuff like Fairmount and Salem can take service starts with the existing single-level fleet as soon as the new bi-level order is delivered and they can bum some lease locos from Amtrak to supply the trainsets. We have not yet implemented 30-minute headway Regional Rail to I-495 on top of these intra-128 Urban Rail proposals, so the service layer cake is not yet thick enough to outpace the OTP margins of the old equipment. And there's enough wiggle room at the terminals to do Fairmount + 1-2 northside service starts before terminal expansion becomes necessary, in part because other deferred suburban expansions have not yet gobbled up the last capacity. It's only when you've got things like RER to Forge Park + Foxboro interlining with the intracity Readville turns that you truly can't live without a fleet of world-class acceleration profile for sake of keeping the rapid turns out of the way of suburban trains on the Fairmount Line. The RER study for the whole system is still a long way from completion, but the Fairmount Urban Rail service plan has been sitting in a file cabinet for 10 years waiting for go-ahead...so there's going to be lag time before RER traffic is thick enough that it's mandatory you elbow the push-pull starter fleet aside for something more nimble.
The one great thing TransitMatters has done is scrub "The vehicle IS the service" out of the conversation, because that was worked to divide-and-conquer perfection back during the original Fairmount DMU debate and during the Olympics debacle. What initially was about giving Dorchester and Hyde Park better transit became this warped Shiny Ball Syndrome conversation about "maybe pry some Fairmount DMU's to run to Foxboro because Bob Kraft = dreamy" and "Track 61 because reasons!!!" elbowing any talk of follow-through on Fairmount service to the side. Now, of course for RER it's academic to state "electric > diesel" and "if electric, EMU > push-pull" because of the southside having existing electrification infrastructure to expand off of. But all the stuff in the RER study stays pretty squarely service-oriented where it should be and doesn't get into vehicle warfare...especially on the northside where it's duly acknowledged that electrification is later-coming. DMU is not a service; it's merely one of many things on wheels that can be run for good service or for total-ass service at the operator's whims.
3.
"Something" ≠ alternate option for nothing. See previous post again: BLX does A, B, C for the North Shore; Urban Rail does X, Y, Z; Yellow Line modernization as follow-thru to A/B/C or X/Y/Z does D, E, F or U, V, W. They're all separate audiences amplifying each other at multimodal convergence points on the North Shore. It's a fallacy to treat one build as a consolation prize for another, because they don't do remotely the same things for the same trip audiences...but the modes do interplay off each other bigtime.
Yes, you absolutely should build Urban Rail to Salem tomorrow if you can...because you probably very much can if as in ^^#2^^ there's a repurposeable single-level fleet to do push-pull service starts. But don't conflate that with relieving pressure on building BLX. It
increases pressure on BLX because the brokenness of the bus terminal and its last-mile frequencies gets ever more acute the more train riders you flush (including inability to fill in the Chelsea-Lynn cavity in 1xx and 4xx route coverage). The last time this was a priority build officials used the apples-apples comparison between modes and "good enough" stopgaps to backpedal from BLX. The fallacy didn't work; we're looking at another about-face to re-study the project...
at the same time as talking about Urban Rail...because people remembered just how different the demand for these projects are. They're not going to re-forget the difference.
Is it going to take awhile to get BLX sorted, much less build? Sure. Does it matter if Urban Rail gets implemented first? No, of course not...net spare coaches + do a very short list of Eastern Route infrastructure upgrades and it's plug-and-play on a 4-year CIP budget. Does one of these questions have anything to do with the other? NO...that's why both projects are simultaneously on the study hotseat in Feb. 2019.
3.
DMU's in X years. The fact of the matter is the domestic market for FRA-compliant DMU vehicles is not just "cool", but in acute crisis in 2019. The most promising supplier, Nippon-Sharyo (who the T almost bought from), has plunged into extreme corporate turmoil over its broken Amtrak coach contract and taken a knee from hawking its self-propelled wares while it licks its wounds. Buy America has scared off most other vendors because nearly all DMU orders under consideration in the U.S. are much too small in quantity to net acceptable price point for assembly at a domestic pop-up factory. You can buy them, but good prices are even harder to come by then they were during the T's cancelled Fairmount vehicle RFP. And it's not at all clear if the recent relaxation in FRA regs is enough to allow the only decent current domestic seller, the ultra-lightweight Stadler GTW, to run without a time separation waiver. Certainly the limited crop FRA-compliants weren't anything special on the performance front because of all the hideous extra bulk they were carrying in the name of FRA buff strength, so availability of something lighter is key. Finally, a number of transit projects nationwide speccing DMU's have been postponed due to fed & state funding issues, with the only ones still proceeding to build being lines using the lightweight/waivered Stadlers and not any FRA-compliants.
Since any vehicle procurement takes a minimum 5 years from RFP to delivery, they're in a bind even for 2025 now. This market freeze will run its course eventually, but probably not for another couple years and until after the new FRA crash regs have sorted themselves out. That means, indeed, it may be outright faster to electrify the Fairmount Line and Worcester Line to Riverside and acquire Bombardier EMU's off of NJ Transit's options than it is to run diesel self-propelleds on Fairmount. No one anticipated the market would go sideways like this, but it has, and it's enough to flip planning for things like the RER study on its head.
.
