General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

TheRatmeister said:
2026-2030 CIP is out.
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Blue Hill Ave Heater Platform Design and Procurement-Phase 1 (P1269)
Installation of heated platform infrastructure at Blue Hill Avenue Station to improve winter conditions, reduce maintenance needs, and serve as a pilot for future installations across the Commuter Rail network. (FY26-30 Programmed Spend: $0.4 M, Total Authorized Budget: $3.4 M)
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This one is interesting. It'd be good if they start building heated platforms.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Take it up with Ed Markey. He secured the $4M federal grant to study this yet again...and yet again come to the same conclusion that all previous studies have. Namely:
  • It doesn't work for Purple-Blue transfers unless you do a weather-protected APM between the CR platforms and the Blue Line headhouse, because people won't use it as a Logan connector when the luggage hardship is that pronounced over the walking distance. Done cheaper it's utterly negligible transfer numbers.
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The Logan connection has functionally been implemented on the Rockburyport Line with SL3 service between Chelsea station and Airport Station.

Whichever path a commuter takes it’s still a two-transfer ride (and Chelsea arguably better because you don’t have the long walk/APM Wonderland to Wonderland).
a. Chelsea CR Station <-> Airport BL Station <-> Logan
or
b. Wonderland “CR” Station walk to Wonderland BL Station <-> Airport BL Station <-> Logan

No need for more study unless you’re a pandering politician.
 
Also what is up with the four car train sets they’re planning to run on the Red Line? I don’t understand the objective (increased frequency, running more CRRC train sets?).
 
WestMedford said:
Also what is up with the four car train sets they’re planning to run on the Red Line? I don’t understand the objective (increased frequency, running more CRRC train sets?).
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They don't have enough 1500s/1600s anymore to run a full service. So the choice is to either cut frequencies or run some shorter trains. I think we can all agree that shorter trains is the correct decision, it's just a shame it's gotten to this point.
 
Oh it’s a deterioration of service, not an improvement … whoops my bad haha! Typical T should have known.

Yeah the oldest in the fleet. Ugh wish CRRC could move quicker.
 
themissinglink said:
This one is interesting. It'd be good if they start building heated platforms.
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There isn't a ton of information there, but are we talking overhead heaters or heated platform surfaces/sidewalks or possibly both?

UMass Medical Campus in Worcester actually has radiant heated sidewalks from the main entrance down to the parking garage to reduce/limit the amount of sidewalk clearing needed in winter months.
 

MBTA Announces Spring Schedules, Increases Subway and Bus Service Frequency | News | MBTA

Official website of the MBTA -- schedules, maps, and fare information for Greater Boston's public transportation system, including subway, commuter rail, bus routes, and boat lines.
www.mbta.com www.mbta.com

Rising traffic congestion in the Boston area affects bus operations by increasing the travel time for each trip, which can result in buses running behind schedule. To address this challenge, the MBTA will allocate more buses and operators to several routes that have experienced rising traffic congestion: Routes 1, 22, 23, 32, 66, 111, and SL4. These additional resources aim to improve reliability and will allow these routes to meet their existing schedules amidst increased travel delays. More than half of the additional bus operators available this spring will be dedicated to addressing traffic congestion on these routes. These changes do not expand service or increase frequencies beyond the existing schedule.
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Also interesting to note: after being reintroduced in December 2024, 57A service is again being cut in favor of better frequency on the full 57.

They're claiming frequency increases from "every 15-20" to "every 10" on the 77 at peak hours as well. However, the 77 currently seems to run as frequently as every 11 in the AM, and every 12 in the PM, and the new schedule (looking at individual stops lets you display upcoming schedules) don't look any more frequent. Saturday service also doesn't match the 12-14 minutes they claim, though it does seem to be consistently every 15. However, Sunday service is definitely getting an upgrade to every 15 until 8pm.
 
BOS2BON said:
The FY 26-30 CIP has been posted:
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1000031407.png

Building a substation to power the orange line and a ferry and somehow claiming it has something to do with electrifying the Newburyport line is interesting.
 
HelloBostonHi said:
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Building a substation to power the orange line and a ferry and somehow claiming it has something to do with electrifying the Newburyport line is interesting.
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I mean, they're not proposing a new one - there's already an Orange (and Green) Line substation in the North Station basement. Unless I'm very mistaken, it's even fairly new - it was rebuilt as part of the 2004 superstation. This diagram predates that, but is likely still largely accurate - North Station is a major node in the power system.
1000038265.jpg

The catch is, it's fed by ancient cable from the South Boston Power Complex. That's failed a few times in recent years, to catastrophic effect, and so cable replacement features heavily in the CIP. Also, the existing infrastructure isn't going to have nearly enough power to feed the demand from charging BEMUs in the North Station terminal district. After all, there's a reason why GLX substations (too new to be shown) are fed by Eversource. The T's existing power system just won't stretch to supporting it, BEMU charging or OCS so either way you're going to need to build a pretty substantial expansion in electrical infrastructure at North Station by bringing in a high voltage line from a utilty.

I'd weight the "develop infrastructure" bit of that CIP line more heavily - I read it as basically an early action with side benefits. Notice how little green (Ie, redundant external utility connections) there is on that diagram? Sizing the connection to provide the NS OL/GL substation with a redundant power supply from Eversouce concomitant with bringing the power needed for the future North Station terminal district seems prima facie reasonable to me.
 
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The
Stlin said:
Also, the existing infrastructure isn't going to have nearly enough power to feed the demand from charging BEMUs in the North Station terminal district. After all, there's a reason why GLX substations (too new to be shown) are fed by Eversource. The T's existing power system just won't stretch to supporting it, BEMU charging or OCS so either way you're going to need to build a pretty substantial expansion in electrical infrastructure at North Station by bringing in a high voltage line from a utilty.
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The southside supplies the entire terminal district from a 25 kV Amtrak substation way out in Sharon that covers 30 linear miles of wires end-to-end, so there's nothing saying that there needs to be a sub sited right at/near the terminal district to provide adequate power. They wouldn't need to build any Regional Rail subs at North Station or Boston Engine Terminal at all if the stupid discontinuous electrification plan didn't leave Somerville-Chelsea un-wired in pants-shitting fear of undercutting 3 measly Sullivan Square overpasses. Now they're going to have to put a regular sub in Chelsea/Revere AND augment the terminal district with one for charging instead of just letting the Chelsea/Revere sub be built out like to-be-expanded Sharon to cover everything for 15 miles in each direction. This is where their claims of "cost savings" from batteries starts to come completely unglued.

I also highly doubt that the North Station sub work is even going to provide a capable feed for BEMU charging. 600V DC traction subs are radically different from 25 kV AC traction subs. It's not like you can build one to safeguard the subway's power draw and just use the slack to charge BEMU's. It would have to be a completely separate and other sub from the existing 600V DC network, and there's not likely enough room for that at North Station.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
The

The southside supplies the entire terminal district from a 25 kV Amtrak substation way out in Sharon that covers 30 linear miles of wires end-to-end, so there's nothing saying that there needs to be a sub sited right at/near the terminal district to provide adequate power. They wouldn't need to build any Regional Rail subs at North Station or Boston Engine Terminal at all if the stupid discontinuous electrification plan didn't leave Somerville-Chelsea un-wired in pants-shitting fear of undercutting 3 measly Sullivan Square overpasses. Now they're going to have to put a regular sub in Chelsea/Revere AND augment the terminal district with one for charging instead of just letting the Chelsea/Revere sub be built out like to-be-expanded Sharon to cover everything for 15 miles in each direction. This is where their claims of "cost savings" from batteries starts to come completely unglued.

I also highly doubt that the North Station sub work is even going to provide a capable feed for BEMU charging. 600V DC traction subs are radically different from 25 kV AC traction subs. It's not like you can build one to safeguard the subway's power draw and just use the slack to charge BEMU's. It would have to be a completely separate and other sub from the existing 600V DC network, and there's not likely enough room for that at North Station.
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You're not wrong regarding the short gap in the discontinuous electrification plan being illogical, but I would point out that the 2022 Network Rail analysis of just the Providence/Stoughton Lines indicated that running on OCS would require an infill substation in Roxbury, let alone electrifying something the size of the proposed Widdet Circle yard. The same applies to the Northside; I actually think the NS sub would be at the CR shops where there's a better grid connection, then just cabled over.

As far as the transit sub goes, it provides 600V DC to the 3rd rail/GL catenary, but everything in the distribution network until the TPSS is 13.8kV AC, every line in red on that map; I believe it's rectified down to 600V DC at the unit sub level. I would point out that some substations like those from Oak Grove to Wellington are clearly missing, but I believe those, like GLX, are directly utility fed with 23kV, stepped down to 13.8kV.

In essence, I'm not expecting them to power the NS Regional Rail sub off of the Transit side, I'm thinking the opposite. I'm expecting them to bring in something along the lines of a trio of 25kV lines for the RR side, and add in the switchgear and a 25-13.8kV stepdown transformer. That's actually fairly limited as far as equipment goes - I imagine the NS basement is roomy enough that they have the slack space. and would enable the transit side to fail over to the RR side when one of the South Boston lines goes offline.
 
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Stlin said:
You're not wrong regarding the short gap in the discontinuous electrification plan being illogical, but I would point out that the 2022 Network Rail analysis of just the Providence/Stoughton Lines indicated that running on OCS would require an infill substation in Roxbury, let alone electrifying something the size of the proposed Widdet Circle yard. The same applies to the Northside; I actually think the NS sub would be at the CR shops where there's a better grid connection.

As far as the transit sub goes, it provides 600V DC to the 3rd rail/GL catenary, but everything in the distribution network until the TPSS is 13.8kV AC, every line in red on that map; I believe it's rectified down to 600V DC at the unit sub level. I would point out that some substations like those from Oak Grove to Wellington are clearly missing, but I believe those, like GLX, are directly utility fed with 23kV, stepped down to 13.8kV.

In essence, I'm not expecting them to power the NS Regional Rail sub off of the Transit side, I'm thinking the opposite. I'm expecting them to bring in something along the lines of a trio of 25kV lines for the RR side, and add in the switchgear and a 25-13.8kV stepdown transformer. That's actually fairly limited as far as equipment goes - I imagine the NS basement is roomy enough that they have the slack space. and would enable the transit side to fail over to the RR side when one of the South Boston lines goes offline.
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Standard 25 kV railway electrification takes 115 kV single-phase from the utility and puts it through transformers to 50 kV traction voltage (which is then distributed to the trains at 25 kV)...the world-standard "2 x 25" scheme. So it's still quite a bit different from the T's entire rapid transit electrification infrastructure with that whole maze of 13.8 kV interconnects. The nearest 115 kV utility source is Hawkins St. substation by Bowdoin, which is close to North Station but a fairly small neighborhood substation that probably doesn't have capacity to spare for the T's appetite (or else it would've been tapped for redundancy long ago). If not there than they'd be tapping the vastly larger regional source at next-closest Mystic Generating, which lends itself much more to a traction sub sited in Somerville than North Station. If they were planning for the RR side to backstop a disruption on the rapid transit side, they'd be doing this at the nearest GLX substation instead of at North Station.

So no, I don't think it's very likely that that this CIP line item has fuckall to do with BEMU's.
 
The EGE said:
Also interesting to note: after being reintroduced in December 2024, 57A service is again being cut in favor of better frequency on the full 57.

They're claiming frequency increases from "every 15-20" to "every 10" on the 77 at peak hours as well. However, the 77 currently seems to run as frequently as every 11 in the AM, and every 12 in the PM, and the new schedule (looking at individual stops lets you display upcoming schedules) don't look any more frequent. Saturday service also doesn't match the 12-14 minutes they claim, though it does seem to be consistently every 15. However, Sunday service is definitely getting an upgrade to every 15 until 8pm.
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I hadn't even realized they had brought back the 57A.
 
www.bostonglobe.com

Red Line signal problem, shuttle buses slow morning commute - The Boston Globe

For commuters on the MBTA’s Red Line, Tuesday qualifies as a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day” as Judith Viorst once wrote.
www.bostonglobe.com www.bostonglobe.com

Trains between Ashmont, Braintree and Alewife came to a halt around 5:57 a.m. due to a signal problem on the tracks near the Andrew station in South Boston, the T acknowledged on social media.

[...]

According to postings by the T on social media, delays had steadily increased until it reached at 25 minutes. The T reported the regular service was resuming around 6:34 a.m. with delays of about 15 minutes.
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There is 33 million in the new CIP for countdown clocks upgrades. Does this mean that we will get lcd screen countdown clocks?
 

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