Green Line Extension to Medford & Union Sq

Tallguy said:
If we are going to dream, how about to W Medford?
Click to expand...
The EIS from Oct 2017 (a Notice of Project Change, technically) provides a framework within which a station on the UHaul site could proceed to construction.

Meanwhile, W. Medford (my CR stop since 2005, and I moved here expecting a GLX) has a planning status similar to BLX to Lynn--line-on-map concepts and scorecarding, but not EIS-- and been off the radar for far too long (I don't think it was ever in any EIS, or if it was it is too far out of date).
 
Arlington said:
I thought that was always the plan at all bridges (but maybe I wasn't paying attention)
Click to expand...
When the project was re-bidded, it was stated that the utility bridges would be made permanent, presumably as a cost savings. However, the latest construction update says:
The weekend closure of the School Street Bridge was changed to a full-week closure in order to expedite the work and complete it much quicker than would have been possible through successive weekend closures. As part of that work, the utility bridge is no longer needed because all lines now run underneath the tracks. Thus, this structure was removed at the end of March.
Click to expand...
I've no idea if that's the plan for the other two utility bridges as well.
 
I've had quick conversations with engineers on the project saying they found the cost-cutting measures ended up being effective enough to bring back certain things that were originally cut - perhaps permanent utility relocations were re-included.
 
Arlington said:
The EIS from Oct 2017 (a Notice of Project Change, technically) provides a framework within which a station on the UHaul site could proceed to construction.

Meanwhile, W. Medford (my CR stop since 2005, and I moved here expecting a GLX) has a planning status similar to BLX to Lynn--line-on-map concepts and scorecarding, but not EIS-- and been off the radar for far too long (I don't think it was ever in any EIS, or if it was it is too far out of date).
Click to expand...

No...didn't even make it to the DEIR. West Med was officially cut after the '05 Major Investment Study shoved it in one of the non-preferred Alts. It was on its last legs there, and would've absolutely breathed its last by '06. Stop roster was formally frozen by '08 with the re-phasing of the Mystic Valley Parkway extension cutting the Winthrop St. intermediate. To be fair West Med was always going to be a very awkward proposition, involving stubbing out on the south side of the grade crossing by the Dunkies parking lot in very tight quarters, having the bus berths spread on both sides of the street for lack of any space to cram a busway, and surging ped activity every 6 mins. in a way that High St.'s crosswalks were very ill-prepared to deal with.

That was always going to be a better one to revisit after High St. got a big-sized grade separation project, which RUR frequencies will kick off the advocacy for since High St. gates-down frequencies are going to get pretty brutal by late this decade with interlined :15 bi-directional Lowell/Haverhill frequencies, 6 Downeaster round-trips, and the usual 2+ daily freight round-trips. The ROW is 4-track width here because of the extra freight sidings that used to run to the long gone B&M freight station by Canal St., so any sinking of the railbed would frame the retaining walls for quad-track incline by default. On a base CR-only build the width is going to be enough for 2 tracks sandwiching a 12 ft. island CR platform in the pit + a third side freight passing track for both passage of the full-high platform and also to keep those long daily "DOBO" sand freights to Boston Sand & Gravel from stalling on the mainline incline grade (Lowell Line is certified for 92-car freight lashups, so that is prevailing enough concern to get hard-wired into the base build). The width required for all of that on the base build is completely compatible with a GLX extension...in which case the cut is pre-provisioned for 2 x 2 running tracks and the station is fittable by GLX 'eating' the CR island and affording 2 CR main tracks to the side (crossovers before/after the inclines allowing passenger trains to pass the area of freight train stall risk on the incline). Canal St. ends up being eliminated near the start of the incline with a shortish road bridge over the partially-sunk tracks.

If that's what an 'any'-elimination is going to look like, the results are then plug-and-play for +1'ing from MVP to West Med, eating the CR station outright, and then stubbing out some tail tracks by Playstead Field after top of the incline. It all depends on what GLX right now chooses for its MVP station design. Is it going to stick with the original design up on the embankment such that you can twin the Route 16 rail overpass arch and the historic Mystic River arch with lookalike parallel span couple feet adjacent , or are they still considering the scaled-down ground-level solution stubbing out in the UHaul parking lot to save on egress construction. Obviously the original design on the embankment is more plug-ready compatible with an easy extension after the grade separation was built. However, the ground-level station Alt. had distinctly temporary "Amshack-y" feel with all the features cut to save money so it wouldn't exactly be a tragic waste of money if it were displaced back up on the embankment by a permanent structure 20 years later. It's probably going to take 20 years and considerable interregnum of RUR-era aggravation through those High St. crossing gates before that separation project gets cued up. Eastern Ave. Chelsea is still the consensus #1 crossing elimination systemwide for the painful speed restriction it induces and dangerous sightlines amid heavy gas tanker traffic. And the rest of Chelsea cluster (6th/Arlington + Spruce + Everett Ave. + 3rd + 2nd) shared between RUR and SL3/Urban Ring is close behind as primary elimination targets for clownshoes-overall traffic management...or at least a programmed zapping of all except hardest-to-eliminate Everett Ave. adjacent to the station stop. So West Med--in part because of the relative construction complexity of that trench under High St.--is a decided #3 on the pecking order requiring fairly long lead time to hash out.

I don't think the at-grade MVP station necessarily prevents it simply because it is so dumbed-down that its costs will be more-than amortized by ridership whenever it's time to switch back up on the embankment. But that should be a question they're forced to cover their asses with once community meetings start in earnest on it. And since Tufts is swinging the big TOD stick and providing the institutional momentum for this, they need to be on-the-ball about how RUR service levels + the festering sore of those High St. gates under RUR service levels affects the future environment for MVP. If they're made duly aware that grade crossing elimination upstream may be necessary in an RUR-only universe, and that the base design is likely to be GLX plug-compatible any which way, they may assert their institutional opinions differently on the at-grade vs. embankment option and push for more stringent cost control up on the embankment as the best option for their future portfolio.
 
Last edited:
So in either scenario, there is no GreenLine and Commuter Rail transfer station until North Station? I was thinking the two might meet in West Med. Otherwise Lowell Line riders who need to get to a GLX stop would have to take a train all the way to North Station, then transfer to Green and go all the way back up the line?
 
Deetroyt said:
So in either scenario, there is no GreenLine and Commuter Rail transfer station until North Station? I was thinking the two might meet in West Med. Otherwise Lowell Line riders who need to get to a GLX stop would have to take a train all the way to North Station, then transfer to Green and go all the way back up the line?
Click to expand...

There is no room for a superstation there. The ROW is quad-track width, but there isn't enough room for 2 x 2 tracks AND two sets of superstation platforms. Only a station on one mode or the other. Space crunch is why the GLX plan to awkwardly cram the trolley station on the opposite side of the grade crossing was too much of a mess to proceed, and there definitely isn't room in the cut when all is grade separated. If there's going to ever be an outer suburban transfer station, that's what GLX "Phase IV" to Winchester is for someday far-future as there's plenty of room to run it at ground level into a parking lot stub-out while CR stays up on the viaduct.

But only "someday", because as-noted the need for an outer transfer station is not great here the way GLX + bus connections are going to induce a great exodus from CR boardings at West Med. Because the multimodal frequencies at 6 min. GLX headways + rebooted local bus map slay even :15 RUR frequencies by too great a margin for Purple Line to have much mode share in the future alignment. As per my last post, the exodus from West Med CR to Mystic Valley Parkway GLX down the street will already be far along by the time RUR gets implemented; most of the CR boardings will be gone entirely by then. So when Haverhill joins Lowell in supplying those RUR frequencies it's going to make more sense for Haverhill to skip West Med + Wedgemere for sake of speeding up the end-to-end trip and start picking up the local stops at Winchester Ctr. Meaning the residuals for West Med and Wedgemere will have :30 frequencies vs. :15 for Winch Ctr. + (Montvale or infill TBD) + Anderson + (yes/no keep Mishawum) + Wilmington, acknowledging that sharply diverging utilization. Augmenting the bus network with a frequent West Med.-Wedgemere-Winch Ctr. route off that Davis-College Ave.-MVP circulator is in all likelihood going to be a featured player in the bus revamp plan, because it would supply the superior frequencies out of MVP. Winchester Ctr. ends up the big winner, as it becomes a superstation of sorts if it gains both RUR and a frequent bus to MVP...maybe moreso if Wedgemere gets closed outright for RUR in favor of the bus because its position on a curve with bridge guard rail over a water crossing prevents its platforms from being raised full-high with a gauntlet track.

In effect, the gravitational well of GLX and the connecting buses is going to create a vacuum where West Med is, and a bus-augmented Winch Ctr. is going to accelerate that vacuum through Wedgemere. It'll be a parting-of-the-seas demand-wise...south-of-Wedgemere being GLX + bus connection land, north-of-Wedgemere being sucked into Winch Ctr. as the start of 'prime' RUR demand...and very few fence-sitters still needing to have both modal options available. Reverse-commute audience isn't large here...enough that the MVP-Winch Ctr. frequent bus satisfies that load to the nearest transfer. And the outright frequencies won't be a close enough match to make for any 'tweener zone, especially if Haverhill ridership has too much more to gain by expressing North Station-Winch Ctr. in the pursuit of an even hour's travel time.
 
Ball Sq getting vertical: they have tipped up the first several prefab concrete walls of the power substation (maybe 4 out of an eventual dozen?)
 
stick n move said:
Cant wait to see the street infilled where old lechmere is. Its gonna be such a wide expanse until then.
Click to expand...

It won't be long after old Lechmere is gone before construction starts on punching First Street through to O'Brien and North First.
 
stick n move said:
Cant wait to see the street infilled where old lechmere is. Its gonna be such a wide expanse until then.
Click to expand...

Pan Am got control of the current (old) station site for redev in the big bundle of land swaps that gained the T all of the ex- yard space for building GLX through Brickbottom. I believe PAR long ago bid out the development rights to the Lechmere Sq. slab (much like it did outsourcing Northpoint/Cambridge Crossing to third-party managers) and has already pocketed its handsome paycheck from the proceeds. But whoever is now charge of redevving Lechmere Sq. got installed in that position of power as direct consequence of the T/PAR land swaps and PAR's brokering of the dev rights on the old station property. Final streetscaping for Lechmere Sq. is also the private-funding responsibility of the developer, since PAR accepted that burden in the fine-print of the land-swap deals.
 
DC13229A-ED44-4C14-8113-2AAC790CF971.jpeg
F801EDBF-DE7F-4E8D-B171-62DDD2CF40BF.jpeg
30088500-4DDA-4060-98B4-F74FFE60D87A.jpeg
4B30C6E8-639A-4B8A-BD0A-54E0683E4F90.jpeg
ED53F2DC-7D57-4720-B6F4-47C623EC8F27.jpeg
889E992F-FD62-44BC-9D0B-F09A76DDA69A.jpeg
3EAEA97E-875D-4075-91E9-2F1A20835CF6.jpeg
F44211FF-37DC-4873-9C00-9FBFFBA06383.jpeg
85C04043-C48B-4F34-A704-4F03F6260E66.jpeg
0C6AC326-DE8E-4F1F-A7C1-B47B4AACC9A4.jpeg
16B867DF-3B74-4C0F-ABF6-A5394F4F7A4A.jpeg
B2073A4D-5064-435F-91A9-A755BABBC57E.jpeg
06BFF7CA-FE61-4E94-81A6-DD1BA6BAD83F.jpeg
196A3FDE-C732-45D3-B1BB-69B3EDE5BDE7.jpeg
 
So the glx track is raised above the CR railbed in this section?

Also whats going on at the top of this picture? It looks like the trackbed is way too high, but this section has ballast and a retaining wall so it seems almost finished, then it drops way off down to the CR railbed and that part is unfinished... It seems backwards.
1587335939323.jpeg


I thought I knew what was going on but this picture completely changed that. If anything Id expect the part at CR level would be the part thats ready for track to go in and the part with ballast would need to be excavated.
 
Last edited:
Stick, they’re building up a temporary berm to support the drilling rigs for the retaining walls. Once they finish that, the berm will vanish.
 
At Ball Sq, The prefab walls of the power station have all been tilted up. -- That's a lotta cubic space!
 
Just curious, when this was in the pre-planning stages (ie, 20+ years ago), did they consider simply making it a 4 track commuter rail line with local and express service using the same stops?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top