General RER-type service thread

[F-Line to Dudley]

That makes much more sense. I was looking at the track sidings north of Beverly [which is probably for freight?], but wasn't thinking about the draw.

That's just a maintenance-of-way siding. No freight past the Peabody Branch jobs that do a reverse move at Salem Jct. And not a layover, though they can/do stuff equipment there when service gets hosed.


The swing bridge is the big limiter. You can see on Google that Danvers and Bass Rivers are absolutely filled with recreation and fishing boats. And that bridge is so low-slung it has to open for everything. Summertime it opens between almost every train slot. Right now the T's of a mind to just keep rehabbing it because a new higher span would cost a kajillion dollars, and they won't really have traffic levels demanding that until--realistically--Portsmouth service is cranking along at high headways. So this really isn't going to work for Indigo headways with the number of daily slots that are going to get fouled by bridge openings.

North Shore Transit Improvements called for +1 rush hour trips to Newburyport and Rockport per peak and much fuller off-peak schedules on each branch. That's probably adequate.


Saugus Draw has far less boat traffic and doesn't open nearly as often. GE doesn't do barges anymore, and Saugus River has gotten so progressively choked with silt over the last 40 years that the rec boat traffic is pretty meager. There's moorings for about 100 small fishing and rec boats clustered near the Route 107 drawbridge, but that's barely a trace of what's up near Beverly. Slightly more openings in summer, but not enough to foul more than an incidental headway.

Saugus Draw can be replaced by a high fixed span, and will be if Blue-Lynn is built. Replacement would be akin to the 4-track Orange + Haverhill bridge over the Mystic. Beverly...not sure if they can make it high enough for a replacement to be a fixed span. Probably would have to be a draw or lift span that goes pretty high and very seldom has to open, but shy of the height of the new Route 1A fixed bridge next to it.

 

[BostonUrbEx]

Eastern Route-- Box District gets served 1/2 mile away by the SL Gateway stop. That's iffy enough on the RR ridership that the duplication probably isn't worth it. If you intend to slowly develop the Urban Ring across the Mystic (BRT or LRT) the ridership at the Eastern Route stop is going to gradually fall and get almost completely subsumed by the SL Gateway/UR stop. That's reason enough to hedge against.

I forgot about the SL Gateway's Box District. You're right, that should be good enough.

Eastern Route
-- As mentioned many times over in the casino thread, it is physically impossible to build a RR stop at Gateway Center/Everett Casino. That's on the steep downgrade off the bridge where the train engineer's sightlines are poor coming over the top of the bridge, and it's on the freight clearance route to Everett Terminal where you can't have high platforms. This location will never get approved for a RR stop for safety reasons, and there is nothing you can do to change that. Urban Ring or bust at that spot. First opportunity for a RR station in Everett is 1/2 mile further back at the 99/16 rotary.

I was planning on putting the platforms on sidings. Or, alternatively, put the platform in between a siding and the #1 track, alongside Gateway Center, leaving the track that will be closest to the Everett Terminal lead as a clearance track.

Eastern Route
-- You're going to have to drop Sullivan because of the capacity pinch for the shared Eastern and Western Route trackage to Mystic Jct. You just can't support those headways on each line with a station stop there. They need to run non-stop and separate themselves out at the junction quickly to keep from getting in each other's way. Sullivan is 2 stops on Orange from NS, and for redundancy purposes you can always spur the Green Line through the carhouse yard and terminate C trains or something at Sullivan well before you build the cross-Mystic UR.

As I noted, the keystone to this entire project is for Sullivan Square to be redesigned. Three tracks with two side platforms just for the DMU's and commuter rail. Center track for commuter rail and freight clearance. May have to sacrifice either the Orange Line express track or the community path, but should be able to fit them all with a redesign. Keep in mind the DMU's aren't going to North Station during peak hours, that's why they need to stop here to allow transfers between eachother. The whole system relies on it.

Eastern Route
-- If you're making any assumptions about the Blue-Lynn extension being completed, West Lynn's going to flip to rapid transit. Though I'd fully expect Riverworks to get moved there to a proper West Lynn station if Indigo happens, so that's OK. Just don't plan on keeping this one on both modes at once if/when Blue happens because the RR ridership will drop to near-zero.

This assumes no BLX. If there were BLX, there'd also be no "Beachland Station" as I'd move Wonderland to Revere St, which is where it should have been originally, in my opinion. If this assumed BLX, there'd probably be no West Lynn or even Goldfish Pond (might as well go all the way to Goldfish Pond with BLX, not that much more complicated and still hits high density.

Lowell
-- Cut Cobble Hill. It's a block away from GLX Washington, which goes to North Station all the same. No one will ride this given the headway disparity 15 mins. vs. 7-or-less.

As I mentioned previously, this was for Lowell to Union, Woburn to Union Sq, etc, and vice versa. The transfer was just a small "bonus".

Naming misc.
-- "Shawsheen" was called "East Billerica" for over a century until that Lowell Line stop got dropped in 1965. That's the section of town it's officially in.

-- "Goldfish Pond" was called "East Lynn" from Day 1 of the Eastern Route until that stop went away (late-50's?). They aren't very imaginative with their names out there, but that's where it's located in local nomenclature.

-- "Warrendale" was Clematis Brook until stop was eliminated along with Beaver Brook in 1978. Recent enough Waltham history to stick with the old name.

Never knew there was actually an East Billerica Station. Shawsheen was the best name I could come up with. Was going to go with South Tewksbury until I saw it was technically in Billerica. I'd rather not have both "North Billerica" and "East Billerica," so I went with Shawsheen since the river was right there. But if it's historically named that way, I'd go with that.

And again, with Golfish Pond, I specifically wanted to avoid having "West Lynn", "Lynn", and "East Lynn". Too many Lynn's!

Clematis Brook doesn't sound like a very good name, especially compared to the neighborhood's name of Warrendale. But to each their own.

 

[George_Apley]

Would the Lowell/NHM have the capacity to send another DMU branch up Wildcat to Lawrence? Would that foul up the Downeaster and other Haverhill expresses? Would two EMU routes on the North Station - Anderson stretch cause too much congestion? My thinking is to get all Lawrence/Haverhill trains off of the slow, grade-crossing heavy, many inside-128 stops, Western Route and on to the faster New Hampshire Main.

 

[George_Apley]

2) Did you think about any non-Boston-centric RER service? Two that immediately come to mind that I think would be successful would be Concord-Manchester-Nashua-Lowell and Lowell-Lawrence-Haverhill. The latter being more expensive due to a new ROW needing to be constructed along 495 and reactivation of an abandoned ROW.

Where would you need to build a new ROW along 495? There's a RR connecting the New Hampshire Main (Lowell) to the Western Route (Lawrence/Haverhill) through Tewksbury.

Unrelated, but does the new Google Mapmaker now only allow you the option of regular maps or "satellite"? There used to be several other layers that were far more awesome for transit mapping.

There are still tons of options. Urb just set his to satellite and marked the map as "read only." He can change the map background, but we can't.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I'll preface my replies by recapping a few things:

1. Your 'mission statement' from Post #1 relies on as few changes to the RR network as possible other than general capacity optimization of the same sort that's needed today. Big-ticket items, especially ones that overlap big-ticket item territory like the Urban Ring, GLX, and BLX...are mis-application of expenses that raid from down payments on much more consequential projects. Building or rebuilding hugely expensive/invasive stations them for Indigo effectively means you are giving up on the rapid transit projects. And if that is not your intention, you will not get budgeting approval for such hugely invasive builds when they are fully expected to have their ridership siphoned away and displaced by a much better mode on a build timetable that everyone hopes is closer to "ASAP" than "when we're dead". This is not a mega-build; keep it simple, and ration it on keep-it-simple.
2. The routes were rationed to high bang-for-buck destinations and didn't attempt to Indigo much that was superfluous.
3. As I noted, the MPO has studied several station sites for side-by-side rapid transit to CR/Indigo transfers (Wonderland, Union, Alewife). All of them projected near-nonexistent ridership and got not-recommended ratings because headways rule over one-seat convenience and 5-7 minute headways beat 15 every time. The only places it worked were major bus hubs (Ruggles/OL, Malden Ctr./OL, Quincy Ctr./Red, Porter/Red because of the 77's sheer heft, Lynn with BLX). And on major reverse-commute destinations (Chelsea/UR and Riverside/GL would still qualify because Chelsea and the Newton intermediates have growing reverse-commute options around 128 and its bus transfers.
4. 1/2 mile is the minimum-most station spacing where stops start diluting each other in a big way. You can troubleshoot most too-closely spaced CR stops (Wedgemere, Cedar Park vs. Melrose Highlands or Wyoming Hill, Norwood Depot, Canton Center, etc.) that way by either seeing a screamingly-obvious rider dilution in the Blue Book figures or digging out a smoking gun on closer survey. This is doubly so when there's catchment overlap on 2 different modes, because people will always...always...flock to the one with lower headways.

I was planning on putting the platforms on sidings. Or, alternatively, put the platform in between a siding and the #1 track, alongside Gateway Center, leaving the track that will be closest to the Everett Terminal lead as a clearance track.

It won't work. At all. Not at any place on that stretch where Gateway and the Casino are an easy ped overpass walk across the tracks from each other. The only place where you can have a Gateway Ctr. stop is back by the rotary where it's moot for casino access.


-- The engineer can't see the platform within safe braking distance coming off the peak of the bridge. This affects full-high platforms, low platforms, and turnouts all the same. This is the #1 blocker.

• The bridge already has a 30 MPH speed restriction. You can't slow that down any further to achieve safer braking distance without causing more engine stall problems (see next point).

-- Engine stalls. This has already been a longstanding problem on this bridge for the freights straining to get over the hump. The Somerville side has a superelevated curve going up to the peak, and the Everett side has a tangent but steeper grade. So if the engine's having problems or there's excessive wheel slip from icy/wet rail the train will fault, go into emergency, and the crew has to pause and perform their full systems check before attempting a restart and releasing the emergency brakes. Not really a problem today because there's nothing on either side of the bridge, and the most the train will backslide before the emergency brakes deploy is a few feet.

• This gets really problematic if the passenger train is starting inbound from a dead-stop at Casino station and has wheel-slip throwing it into emergency...because that 2 feet of backsliding before the emergency brakes stop it dead happens on a platform now in the engineer's blind spot.

• You can't assume this station is going to be 'banned' to push-pulls because those rich residents of Newburyport and Rockport are going to want their weekender one-seat to Wynn-land.

• DMU's are not any more immune to wheel-slip than push-pulls. Proportionately the engines are powered by load enough to move the car with a modest cushion, so the wheel-slip risk from a dead start is not much different in bad conditions on a DMU vs. a 6-car push-pull hauled by an HSP-46. Or a Mattapan trolley, for that matter.

-- The platform itself is going to be on the commuter rail's 3rd-steepest grade (Wellington tunnel #1, Old Colony Neponset bridge #2, Everett side of the Mystic bridge #3). The platform's going to have a pronounced tilt to it, which is dangerous in icing conditions. Will not be approved for construction, any way shape or form.

• No, leveling an entire half-mile of the ROW out to the rotary is not a viable option. For the cost involved you are better off bringing SL Gateway here or the UR over from Somerville. The entire mission statement for an Indigo network--bootstrapping on modestly capacity-improved existing infeastructure--starts collapsing on itself when modera-/mega- project lever perfectionism starts getting lathered on top of it. No sane sane budgeter will approve something like that for Indigo only when it wastes a down payment on a far better and more 'rapid' UR or SL project that doesn't require tons of earth-reshaping.

Keep to your mission statement here. We've discussed umpteen different Crazy Transit Pitch angles in the Casino thread to get an Indigo stop here...and every single one has flunked the safety test or approached UR- down payment funding commitments to do the fix at diminishing returns. It ain't happening as a RR stop...never ever. UR/SL or bust.

As I noted, the keystone to this entire project is for Sullivan Square to be redesigned. Three tracks with two side platforms just for the DMU's and commuter rail. Center track for commuter rail and freight clearance. May have to sacrifice either the Orange Line express track or the community path, but should be able to fit them all with a redesign. Keep in mind the DMU's aren't going to North Station during peak hours, that's why they need to stop here to allow transfers between eachother. The whole system relies on it.

See my reply earlier. This does not work at all because of the Community College viaduct leaving no space for turnouts without creating gigantic speed restrictions that 1) create a large Orange Line bottleneck reverberating through downtown, and 2) create a large bottleneck on the Eastern + Western Routes eliminating at least one of them from consideration as an Indigo corridor.

You cannot fix this without rebuilding the Sullivan platforms--all modes--from scratch on the other side of Maffa Way, which is too expensive for money better spent on a UR down payment. No sane budgeter will approve that.

Move on. Kajillion-dollar construction projects like this and Gateway/Casino eat into the margins of an Indigo system so severely that it becomes counterproductive Transit OCD to hyper-focus on this instead of building the UR to the same stops. This is supposed to be an optimization of existing infrastructure, not a megaproject unto itself. Nuke-and-rebuild of Sullivan--whether you think that should be a linchpin or not--totally un-does the feasibility of your system.

This assumes no BLX. If there were BLX, there'd also be no "Beachland Station" as I'd move Wonderland to Revere St, which is where it should have been originally, in my opinion. If this assumed BLX, there'd probably be no West Lynn or even Goldfish Pond (might as well go all the way to Goldfish Pond with BLX, not that much more complicated and still hits high density.

Flunks the cost effectiveness test and gets into Transit OCD land to be thinking about moving BL Wonderland instead of building BLX. You won't get access to funds for doing superfluous stuff like that. Change your assumptions to BLX happening for the money that would eat.

As I mentioned previously, this was for Lowell to Union, Woburn to Union Sq, etc, and vice versa. The transfer was just a small "bonus".

"Small" bonuses to not justify the expense. This falls under the the nonstarters those MPO-studied CR/rapid-transit transfer stations were at drawing zero ridership. The higher-headway mode always draws the ridership, and there is no bus terminal here. You can't justify the expense as an exit-only station that draws maybe a couple dozen at most paying revenue customers per day. North Station is almost in eyesight; you can pass it on a Lowell train, transfer to Green, and be right back out there in the span of 10 minutes.

Stick to the script. Accentuate what you've got and keep a shortlist of important infills that the 15 min. headways unlock new ridership on...but do not waste your time on mapmakers' perfection stops where construction unlocks no new ridership sources. It's not a 'small' convenience, it's a capital and ops penalty you don't recover at all.

Never knew there was actually an East Billerica Station. Shawsheen was the best name I could come up with. Was going to go with South Tewksbury until I saw it was technically in Billerica. I'd rather not have both "North Billerica" and "East Billerica," so I went with Shawsheen since the river was right there. But if it's historically named that way, I'd go with that.

And again, with Golfish Pond, I specifically wanted to avoid having "West Lynn", "Lynn", and "East Lynn". Too many Lynn's!

Clematis Brook doesn't sound like a very good name, especially compared to the neighborhood's name of Warrendale. But to each their own.

Call them what they are; those are the geographical names of the locations. Those towns do not want some outsider telling them their names don't have enough pizazz to look good on a map. East Billerica, West Lynn, Lynn/Central Square, East Lynn. That's what they are. And, yes, Clematis and Beaver Brook don't make a lot of sense but those stops are recent enough history that people who used them prior to '78 are still elected officials in Waltham. If they want a different name, let them speak up for one. But this isn't a point worth the energy debating over; lead with the default station names that existed from mid-19th century to modern times.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Would the Lowell/NHM have the capacity to send another DMU branch up Wildcat to Lawrence? Would that foul up the Downeaster and other Haverhill expresses? Would two EMU routes on the North Station - Anderson stretch cause too much congestion? My thinking is to get all Lawrence/Haverhill trains off of the slow, grade-crossing heavy, many inside-128 stops, Western Route and on to the faster New Hampshire Main.

Lawrence is very congested by freights on the Pan Am mainline north of Lowell Jct. in Andover; congestion that's going to get worse when the double-stack clearance project reaches Ayer from the west and intermodal to Portland starts becoming financially viable. With CSX's relocation out to Worcester this is now the most congested freight line on the commuter rail system. It's 2-track width only from Wilmington to 495 because of the street grid and abutters, and North Andover-Haverhill by street grid, bridges, and embankments. Only the immediate Lawrence Yard environs have that are already tri-tracked between both 495 overpasses are wider. And possibly Bradford station if they rebuild the platforms on the footprint of the to-be-vacated layover yard. That's it. Freights and Downeasters already use the Lawrence passing tracks all day long.

So freights and the ever-increasing Downeaster schedule are the practical limiters to Western Route traffic on all those critical 2-track portions (which can never be more than mini-highs except for Lawrence, a yard-shifted Bradford, and Plaistow which is going to be built on a Lawrence-style platform turnout). You might even be stuck with a mini-high at Salem St. (North Wilmington replacement) on the Wildcat unless you double-track with only 1 side platform). The ongoing Haverhill double-track project and TBD relocation of Bradford layover to more spacious environs will eliminate congestion-related delays, allow for at most a couple more peak slots, and offer up a much more evenly-spaced off-peak schedule instead of the giant gaps that exist middays today. And the NH Main relocation substantially shortens travel times, which can open up a slot or two on more nimble dispatching. But it's not going to be transformative. Haverhill will always have a conventional CR schedule with dense peak and few freights, and no more than hourly off-peaks with the held freights getting their slots to move both directions either side of Lawrence Yard. It is what it is. It's main need going forward is longer trains, which is why Malden Ctr. and Wakefield are such painful ones on the current schedule. It's entirely possible they'll be running eight-packs up there at rush hour in another 15 years.


NH Main has a ton of unused capacity. It's not going to help you much as noted with branching, but it can take a huge increase in traffic over today. Especially with Anderson and your would-be infill at Montvale being built from Day 1 with passing tracks, West Medford and Wilmington easily reconfigurable with passing tracks. Wilmington would probably have to get moved south of the overpass anyway to permit full Haverhill service because of the way the platforms are awkwardly staggered around the junction, and simply pulling the outbound platform out from under the bridge opens up the center track space for freights and Downeasters to blow by. West Med can simply have its inbound platform moved back for a center track likewise for freights, Downeasters, and expresses. It's really only Winchester Ctr. that is locked in by the viaduct to only 2 platform tracks and mandatory mini-highs. Plus Wedgemere by the water and road bridges its platforms sit on, and Mishawum by the road bridge its platforms sit under...but those are station cuts as ridership-useless to Indigo as they are on Lowell/Haverhill CR.

Wilmington-Lowell has much less freight because all the Boston jobs originate out of Lawrence and turn out on the Lowell Branch on the other side of Lowell station en route between North Chelmsford Jct. and Lowell Jct. in Andover. The midsection is just near-daily Billerica shop yard moves, a couple local customers, and occasional overnight expresses to Boston when no passenger traffic is moving. No intercity either until whatever day a N-S Link allows for Concord NE Regionals a la Amtrak's multi-fork Virginia Regionals. North Billerica can be reconfigured with passing tracks in somewhat pain-in-butt fashion if you move the NStar power lines abutting the outbound platform, but it's probably not necessary for any forseeable traffic increases...NH Capitol Corridor included. East Billerica would get built exactly like Anderson and Montvale with passing tracks from Day 1 in order to get the full-high platforms on a clearance route.

 

[George_Apley]

Would it be possible to dispatch both a South Station - Riverside shuttle DMU, and a South Station - Framingham DMU alongside increased schedule push-pull Worcester service? Assuming all signal upgrades and requisite passing tracks are laid down. Or would it only make sense to do one or the other?