Green Line Extension to Medford & Union Sq

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Lowell Line is by far the most flood-prone line on the T. Wilmington and portions in Winchester the worst. It got its ass kicked in the March 2010 floods...tracks underwater, signals shorted-out. Needs a lot of culvert work in the problem spots.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

I remember some really bad flooding on the Fitchburg Line near Union Square last year
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

found5dollar said:
some really good stuff about phase one can be found in this slide show....

http://greenlineextension.com/documents/PubMtgs/Phase1/Phase1_PubMtgPres20120124.pdf
Click to expand...

Found$ -- when you thumb through the slides -- its quite easy to see -- why the project will take quite a while -- Unfortunately -- I envision another Big Dig -- albeit on a mini-scale -- this whole project will last the full decade

F-Line, Digit, etc -- you heard it first here -- First revenue service no earlier than January 2020
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Yeah, this is not going to be as simple as you'd wish.

Also factor in all the labor bull shit, political posturing, and price sings in materials... it will get done but it won't be pretty.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Let's hope it doesn't get too ugly. A post Big Dig style backlash against a transit project could really harm future efforts.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

I think you guys are a bit out of line. Yes it will take a long time, but the real reason the Big Dig had a backlash was because of the sheer volume of corruption and shoddy workmanship, ultimately leading to the death of an innocent woman. I doubt that something that is in essence new construction, like the greenline extension, could be taken to the same extreme as a complete redesign of the major traffic patters through the downtown of a major world city.

Will it take longer than needed? yes.
Will it be attractive? perhaps.
Will it be as big of a pitfall as the Big Dig was? no.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

found5dollar said:
I think you guys are a bit out of line. Yes it will take a long time, but the real reason the Big Dig had a backlash was because of the sheer volume of corruption and shoddy workmanship, ultimately leading to the death of an innocent woman. I doubt that something that is in essence new construction, like the greenline extension, could be taken to the same extreme as a complete redesign of the major traffic patters through the downtown of a major world city.

Will it take longer than needed? yes.
Will it be attractive? perhaps.
Will it be as big of a pitfall as the Big Dig was? no.
Click to expand...

Found$ -- you'll note I said -- "Mini-Big Dig"
But have no illusions whenever the cost of a project is measured in hundreds of milliions of $ and the time table is quoted as taking 6 or 7 years -- This is a complex project

The oppottunity for screw-ups, waste and delay are defiitely there

Consider the simple task of replacing an old brick 24 inch drain by a 30 inch modern drain and while you are at it raising the level of the road while maintaining the clearance under the rail ROW

There are a lot of reasons why this could go way over budget and delay well past the scheduled end of Phase 1

So be forwarned!
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

Still don't know why they're tying both the Union Branch and the Washington St. stub together as a single phase. The Washington St. bridge is going to be a bear in itself to replace, and whether the station stops short of the bridge or not there's enough infrastructure garbage to clean out here that it's a lead weight on opening the Union Branch sooner. For one, they have to do all the freight track reconfiguring and rebuilding for Pan Am to make this happen. They can do the Union Branch and get it done-done without needing yet to touch the freight track that runs 100 ft. north of the Fitchburg Line from the little yard off Washington.

They've got much better chance of getting useful service operating sooner and without overruns by severing all construction dependencies between the branches.

1) Current plan for the prep work in '12 the 2 bridges. Start of all that invasive Lowell Line culvert work and keep chipping away.
2) Lechmere relocation. That's the part that has pretty low risk for overruns. Adequate tail-track space here to open the new station and do away with the old before anything else is ready. If they throw in a couple temporary crossovers behind the station they can replace the current storage yard space without too much inconvenience to ops (just have to take those crossovers out when the next segment opens and those tail tracks become regular mainline track).
3) Build the Fitchburg Line overpass and Union Branch flyover construction. There's only a little culvert work needed at this crossing, so also lowish risk for overruns.
4) Build Union Branch next to Fitchburg Line. Open it.

THEN let themselves get delayed into oblivion on the Medford branch. They'll start taking on water with construction/permitting/mitigation surprises right when they hit Washington St., no doubt. And that'll immediately pinch their funding for the Innerbelt maintenance facility. Fine...awesome. Deal with that pain accordingly. But keep that mess firewalled from Lechmere, Union, and the Fitchburg overpass as much as possible because those 3 jobs are the ones that'll stay closest to budget, require the lowest impacts to current Green Line ops, and can actually open (Lechmere at minimum) by 2014 if they don't take for freaking ever to get started.

It sounds like they're still fine-tuning how to step it out, so it may come to this keep-it-simple-stupid sequence soon enough when they release the next schedule. But would've been nicer and allayed more of STEP's concerns if they went for this separation of the builds right up front.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

F-Line, are they still going to rehab the Cobble Hill Track? And when?
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

BostonUrbEx said:
F-Line, are they still going to rehab the Cobble Hill Track? And when?
Click to expand...

Whenever they cut the Pan Am Willey track that's being displaced by the Medford branch on the north side of the to-be-reconstructed bridge over the Fitchburg Line. They use that 2-3 times a week to swing around BET from the Lowell Line to the Eastern Route to serve customers in Everett, Swampscott, Salem, and Peabody. Brickbottom station blocks the Willey track where it joins the Lowell Line near Washington St. bridge, so the Cobble Hill track has to be rehabbed before they cut it. Cobble Hill is operable, but in such sorry shape they only use it to store rusted-out boxcars, unused trailers, and piles and piles of extra MBTA ties and rail for the ongoing Fitchburg and Haverhill double-track projects.

They also have to rebuild the derelict second storage track at Cobble Hill because the Union branch cannibalizes their storage siding past the Medford St. bridge used every day. And when the maintenance facility gets built they lose 2 of the 4 Valley tracks to the new Green Line yard leads, meaning the other 2 have to be kept clear for thru moves instead of being used for extra storage. CSX uses the Valley tracks 7 days a week to go to Everett terminal, Pan Am Southern (the Norfolk Southern half of the partnership) is starting up a new daily 60-car ethanol train from Fitchburg to Global terminal in East Boston this summer, and T work equipment gets shuttled almost every day to/from that commuter rail maintenance shed at Alewife. Lots of little trackwork junk and relocations like that to take care of because Pan Am's tight on storage space and there's a surprising lot of freight moves in the vicinity of BET all day long.
 
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Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

It looks like Union Square Station is still not being designed in a way that would allow a future extension to Porter Square.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

MBTAddict said:
It looks like Union Square Station is still not being designed in a way that would allow a future extension to Porter Square.
Click to expand...

They're also not being designed to allow for heavy rail conversion (as per what people on the project have told me). They've pretty much chopped Rt 16 off as well.

And yet... we've still tripled the pricetag in 8 years.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

MBTAddict said:
It looks like Union Square Station is still not being designed in a way that would allow a future extension to Porter Square.
Click to expand...

I interpret the lower-level entryway as being temporary...there until that whole lot gets built out (as some of the other drawings show), with only the upper-level entry being permanent. If you were on your way to Porter, you could knock out that lower entry and still have the upper (which overhangs the tracks and does not rely on columns through the ROW, as I read it.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

The Prospect St. bridge is the only one en route to Porter that's too narrow for 4 tracks because it was rebuilt sometime after the 4th track went away with a large retaining wall on the Union side. See p.4 of the PDF and how the trolley on the right is blocked. So to avoid having to do an unnecessary and expensive bridge reconstruction they're having the station abut the retaining wall and end there. That was always the plan. To go to Porter they'd bore through and underpin the retaining wall with an arch underpass, where it's far enough below street level that it wouldn't require radical reconstruction of the bridge. From there the ROW's 4-track straight out to under the Beacon St. bridge.

Provisioning for it means not placing any restrictions in the station design to punching that hole under the bridge, as obviously Porter's out of the question if they had to blow up and start over with a whole new station. That is what STEP has been hounding them about for years to not slip a fast one into the design. They want to make sure the station's got the built-in structural flex for a quick reconfiguration a la Arlington's point about the lower entryway. It's impossible to tell from a simple rendering on a PowerPoint what the structural engineering implications are. But that's why STEP hounds them on it every single meeting about that station.


http://www.somervillestep.org/files/STEPbrochureCurrentTransProjs2011.pdf

The T's told them in writing that the design won't preclude it. So their paranoia about always bringing it up is an effort at documenting, documenting, documenting it with level of specificity that'll stick for legal purposes if somebody tries to pull a fast one. I'm reasonably confident with how often it's been brought up that the T and its contractors aren't arming a booby trap in this station's design. STEP merely wants to makes sure that carries through to the final-final engineering schematics, not just the pretty pictures in the PowerPoints.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

F-Line, thanks for clearing that one up. I didn't realize that the design as shown would (theoretically) allow for a quick punch-through to Porter.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

I doubt it will be as bad as some people fear it will be. The Viaduct might become a pain , but the track shifting and phases down the road should be pretty easy.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

new slide show for Gilman Square and Lowell St. stations. The new renderings and such start about half way though the document.

http://greenlineextension.com/documents/PubMtgs/LowellGilmanPresentation_030712.pdf

Gilman leaves me with a "meh" feel, but i do like the brick. Lowell on the other hand i am loving. The interesting play with granite bollards and the way it bows back from the street is realy interesting and will create a great space for a transit station plaza.
 
Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011

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