Given that the allocated spend for this year is so small, maybe it’s just for some design/planning work which they are choosing to funnel through the T’s finances? That is indeed strange though.
I can't imagine what that would be. MassDOT spazzed on its only substantive Hartford Line commitment, the layover yard near Springfield Union Station, meaning service levels
linking the cities of the Hartford-Springfield metro area are still kneecapped at an anemic limbo north-of-HFD because of not nearly enough space to park trains at Springfield. CTrail is forced to make do with storage nooks-and-crannies, with its service plan stymied for filling out the north-of-HFD frequencies to parity with south-of-HFD. Once the feds backed up the money truck with grants for the Springfield Union Station reno, the state of MA completely lost interest in paying for anything itself out there...a complete double-cross of ConnDOT who thought they were getting substantive help on key bucket list items. The working relationship between the two states has then been further damaged by the Baker Admin.'s slew-footing of
Inland Route Amtrak service by substituting their own books-cooked East-West study for the multi-state NNEIRI study, omitting Connecticut almost entirely from the proposed service. The two bordering states that serve up that metro area are in absolutely no mood for cooperation, and without cooperation and integration of HFD-SPG Metro there's no leg for Knowledge Corridor commuter rail to stand on.
For one, you need the Springfield layover pre-existing to start it off. And since that is supposed to be a combo facility with Amtrak, they'd wouldn't be borrowing the MBTA's engineering dept. out-of-district (a legit outsource function for MassDOT freight and passenger rail projects that the T is directly compensated for) to advance design on it...they'd be borrowing Amtrak's engineering dept. It's a complete waste of energy to doodle around on other aspects of the project until they have a home base set up for the service. This funding item may as well just be lighting paper on fire for more studies.
But more importantly, the thing is only going to function as an appendage to Connecticut's dreams. You
need the Hartford Line pumping at full-build frequencies first and foremost. You need it to seed the market, including seeding new investments in PVTA connecting buses to Springfield Union for the train frequencies. You need the full Hartford Line schedule to be well-established if separate Knowledge Corridor service is to survive as a Springfield-Greenfield ping, because nobody will ride the north leg if there aren't effortless transfer frequencies. Hartford-Springfield metro region plausibly extends as far north as Northampton (if not quite Greenfield), with I-91 having icky traffic up there due to the Holyoke lane drop. Lots of people who live there commute to workplaces in and around Hartford. You'd also need the full Hartford Line schedule to be fully-established before you ever had any aims of doing run-thru Hartford-Springfield-Greenfield commuter service under a unified CTrail badge (very superior to simply running a MassDOT SPG transfer service). The distance from Hartford to Greenfield is exactly 60 rail miles, nearly identical to the 60 miles that separate New Haven to Springfield on the base Hartford Line service, and nearly identical to the 60+ miles that separate Hartford and Bridgeport should CTrail start overlapping NHV-BPT with Hartford run-thrus in the future. The Hartford Line is easily set up for a layer cake of New Haven-Springfield turns, Hartford-Bridgeport turns, and Hartford-Greenfield turns that all overlap at Hartford Union. But MassDOT doesn't get an appendage in that setup unless it starts cooperating with ConnDOT. Right now ConnDOT feels punked by Baker over the lack of commitment on the Springfield layover and the East-West switcheroo.
There's absolutely something to tap here if they get their vision shit in order. But the only way the vision shit is going to get sorted out is if they re-embrace their neighbors and start cooperating with ConnDOT again in meaningful, substantive ways. They can't doodle this one in a vacuum.
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