General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

Riverside said:
Are they running them with reduced crews? (i.e. no conductors?) Like, is there any nominal justification to be had here? Reduced cost from staffing stations or something? I feel like a bad railfan but I somehow had missed that they were still running trains, all this time...
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It was just a hidden way of kicking out homeless people.

Aside from lacking yard space, some of the longer runs are close to 2 hours. So closing for 4 hours doesnt make sense when you need to move trains from one end to another.

I am not sure if they have conductors on board. Knowing the MTA...probably.

NJTransit, in April, announced huge pandemic bus cuts in service. But then...didnt. Apparently, they couldnt come to an agreement with the union, so they would have had to run empty buses anyway. Instead they kept 98%* of the service, and it was open to customers, but the website had a huge banner saying "reduced service: refer to schedules" and then linked to...the regular schedules.

*They cut seasonal runs, like Six Flags and beach express service


PATH is running a similar lie. They say two stations are closed nightly in Manhattan for "COVID cleaning" but, um, its been the same two stations since April. Curious that the least used stations need this super special nightly cleaning, while every other station doesnt. Curious indeed.
 
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Found this hidden away on the MBTA website. Thought we were done with these "one time" core shutdowns but I guess not. Absolutely no rationale given for it.
 
With the last conclusion of these core shutdowns, I calculated they were about 1/5 done, length wise, for track replacements, which corresponds well to their 5 year shutdown plan. Their info on where the track has been replaced and where it needs to be replaced is not readily available to the public, as far as I'm aware. I think there's a fair bit of work outside of the downtown core area, though, so yes, it's concerning they're still shutting it down.
 
I feel like the way it's phrased makes it sound longer than it is; if it's only two weekends wouldn't it be easier to just list the dates?

Any other year I imagine the downtown businesses would be pretty upset at the timing, during the busiest point of the shopping season. Probably isn't at much of a concern this year though.

Side note: any ops ideas on why it's such a long stretch? I assume all of downtown is closed for material loading in and out, but is it really that hard to close only south of Community? Is Community low enough ridership on weekends that it doesn't matter?
 
Andrew said:
Side note: any ops ideas on why it's such a long stretch? I assume all of downtown is closed for material loading in and out, but is it really that hard to close only south of Community? Is Community low enough ridership on weekends that it doesn't matter?
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I have no idea, and moreover I'm perplexed when looking at the crossovers near Sullivan and Tufts Medical: on the north side, you either need to run all the way down past Community College to cross over, or you need to wrongrail all the way from Wellington through Assembly to Sullivan. It's not quite as severe on the south side, but it's still a similar problem -- either run ahead almost all the way into Chinatown, or wrongrail most of the way from Back Bay to Tufts Medical.

Now, granted, weekend Orange Line is currently scheduled for 9-11 minute headways, so the single-tracked wrongrailing wouldn't be as crazy as it would be during the week, at least on the south side. But the whole damn thing is odd.
 
Wrong railing from Wellington to Sullivan is what they do. Trains can't cross over at Community, because the truck pad is between Community and Sullivan. Workers need the truck pad to move equipment and materials onto the ROW.
 
Andrew said:
Side note: any ops ideas on why it's such a long stretch? I assume all of downtown is closed for material loading in and out, but is it really that hard to close only south of Community? Is Community low enough ridership on weekends that it doesn't matter?
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I believe it's also because it's easier to have buses layover at Sullivan and not have to pull into Community College at all. Same reason the buses run to Haymarket not N Station, Haymarket has a busway while North Station is a detour and a mess. So the buses don't pull off for Community College or North Station, they just stop on Rutherford/N Washington a few blocks away.
 
Ch1ck3nPotPi3 said:
Wrong railing from Wellington to Sullivan is what they do. Trains can't cross over at Community, because the truck pad is between Community and Sullivan. Workers need the truck pad to move equipment and materials onto the ROW.
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This is true. Similar to when they're working in the SW Corridor cut, this truck pad between Mass Ave. and Ruggles has to be used as a staging area for getting stuff onto the ROW. The work fleet of rapid transit flatcars, hoppers, ballast-dump cars isn't vast enough (needing to be exchanged by flatbed truck between non-interconnected lines for different big jobs) that they lose some efficiency/capacity trying to stage everything from a single-point yard. Truck-load augments at access pads like these end up leveraged to the hilt, and so you've got to factor the nearest turnback crossovers to the loading pads for where service practically needs to be shorted.

Plus some crossovers more amenable than others for turning trains. Red Line's easy to cut wrong-rail at Harvard Inbound when the operator can walk the length of the train outside and change ends during the turnover dwell. Not so much if the crossover happens to be past the short-turn station somewhere on open track and require more time chew to walk inside the train for the ends-change.


That doesn't mean this OL shutdown necessarily corresponds 1:1 with the best short-turn ops vs. station pairs. We don't have the full ops dept. story on what precisely is being done, so can only rely on guesstimates. But overall it's not quite as simplistic to plan out as just eyeballing nearest crossover on a track chart and cutting at the adjacent stop.
 
"Fare gates open" is a much better policy than "find someone to give you a piece of paper"

Is that how they've been doing these all? So progressive!
 
Answer to a question I've had:
Hynes Station
Scope: MassDOT has designated a private developer to construct an air rights development over Hynes Station and the MassPike I-90 at the northeast corner of Boylston St. and Massachusetts Ave. The design will provide a renovated and fully accessible station with a reopened Boylston St. entrance incorporated into the new air rights development.
Update: The MBTA is meeting with the developer on a biweekly basis to define the station’s external dimensions, structural constraints, and utility upgrades. A design consultant began working in March 2020 and the conceptual design is expected to be complete by December 2020. Full design is expected to be complete in June 2022 and it is expected that construction will be complete in December 2025.
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Looking forward to a new Hynes Station... In 2026...
 
jass said:
"Fare gates open" is a much better policy than "find someone to give you a piece of paper"

Is that how they've been doing these all? So progressive!
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Yes, that's consistent with how the project has been handled all along. Any time there is a shut down of Orange sections, the parallel green line stations have open fare gates.
 
That work has been crawling... It doesn't look like they've moved much since the summer, despite working most weeknights I believe..
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
That's some baaad spalling for a station that's only 15+ years old.
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The platform tiles started cracking within weeks of the station opening. The upper level Green Line platform, in particular, gets a lot of vibration from the trolley traffic. The rigid tile was never a good surfacing idea for a platform that vibrates that much.
 
JeffDowntown said:
The platform tiles started cracking within weeks of the station opening. The upper level Green Line platform, in particular, gets a lot of vibration from the trolley traffic. The rigid tile was never a good surfacing idea for a platform that vibrates that much.
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It's a concrete-anchor trackbed with sleepers bolted straight to the floor and no vibration-dampening rock ballast. Not as godawful loud as the floating-slab trackbed on Red-Alewife or Orange-South Cove, but very vibration-heavy. They may want to seriously consider a changeover to ballasted track to take the edge off this problem's spread across the concourse. Either that or one of the newfangled composite sleeper mounts made of vibration-dampening high-strength rubber-plastic material. If the concourse is shaking its own surface to dust that quickly every subsequent resurface job is going to keep repeating the sequence at similarly accelerated failure modes. Unless they do something novel to the surface like rubber-composite tiles or something that have natural flex and put more frequent joints in the underlying pour, but that's clearly not the fixit they're mounting here. That fresh pour from the pics is going to age in same dog years from all the tremors as the last one.:(
 
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