Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011
Yeah, this whole process has been a clusterfuck. And that spokesflak is very ill-informed. I'll trust what the commuter rail and Pan Am employees say about this regularly and loudly on RR.net: slow...motion...train...wreck. Unless the top engineers are working on this and there's simply a communication problem on the chain of command, this is careening towards a nasty dispute that's going to force cost-bloating changes to the design.
-- Norfolk Southern (CSX's direct national competitor) is the other big player here, since they own 50% of the Pan Am mainline from New York to Ayer and are investing big in New England. While Boston is not their territory, Pan Am has to live up to its end of the bargain and develop more business to/from Ayer for Norfolk Southern to move nationwide. Kneecap Somerville access and introduce an artificial ceiling on how much PAR can develop in Everett, in Peabody, and longer-term in Eastie and possibly Charlestown...and NS is going to get very angry. NS is like CSX in that they are so huge and cutthroat that they crap bigger'n MassDOT and have ample means of fucking with passenger traffic on the Fitchburg Line and Conn River Line--or, simply dis-investing in Massachusetts freight--if they feel like they're being trampled upon by local yokels. GLX needs to tread carefully even with them an indirect presence, because they don't screw around. And the working relationship with them so far has been very good, and not something the state would ever want to throw away.
-- The Reading Line does not have the clearances to handle the freight that comes into Boston. Height restrictions and width restrictions. That's why it's no longer used for thru freight except as a backup route, and why neither of the customers on the tiny Medford Branch have taken a delivery in over 4 years (the big-size boxcars and refrigerator cars they need don't fit). Total nonstarter to expect they're going to be able to use it full-time. And the residents in Reading, Wakefield, and Melrose who very closely abut the tracks are going to complain loudly.
-- The inner Fitchburg Line no longer can handle wide freights because of the new full-high platforms at Littleton and South Acton, it's got height limitations (not as much as Reading, but enough to limit future growth), it's got a lot of grade crossings where slower freight is going to keep the gates down a lot longer than passenger trains, and the NIMBY's in the posh bedroom communities are going to fight renewed freight traffic with Satan's fury. It also can't take Lawrence-originating jobs. Lawrence is where the trains come from because it's a sorting yard where freight trains are broken up then blocked together in the correct car order for the order in which they serve local customers. Sorting is space-intensive work and the big yards in Ayer don't have room to do that; Ayer takes the long-distance loads. It's an analogue between CSX in Worcester (long-distance/intermodal) and Framingham (sorting). So it's tone-deaf of GLX to treat it like a yard is a yard is a yard. That's not how freight works.
Fitchburg isn't an option for except the CSX Grand Junction jobs that only use several hundred feet of it once a day.
-- Lowell is a protected wide clearance route, tall enough to take modified low-rider autoracks, has just those two Medford crossings to navigate and is by far the safest and least invasive of the 3 routes, is a brisk trip so they slip those daytime jobs between commuter slots with no interference, is under-capacity and can take a lot more traffic than it currently does, already has lots of local freight all points north of Winchester Ctr., and is well-buffered by vegetation for minimal inconvenience to abutters (except for Winchester Ctr. where people with nothing better to do with their time bitch endlessly about the overnight freights). Why
that one is being fucked with is bonkers. If anything Reading and inner-Fitchburg are the disposable ones nobody will complain about.
-- This runs roughshod over MassDOT's own
Freight Plan. That document couldn't spell out more succinctly what the state's priorities are for freight, where the high-return public investment is, and where the growth
that puts more revenue into the state's coffers comes from. Did these people even read it? Are they taking their cues from the South Coast Rail Task Force which has done little but shit all over the freight the state wants to develop on the South Coast? Secretary Davey: wasn't the whole point of the MassDOT mothership reorganization to get more coordination between sub-agencies and fiefdoms that either don't talk to each other or actively fight with each other? This is on you.
-- This runs roughshod over Massport's seaport plans, also spelled out to the nines. After they're done with Southie they want to get more freight rail to Charlestown and Eastie, which currently have tracks but no traffic. And to segment the ports by purpose: Southie = containers, Charlestown = autos, Quincy = tankers, Eastie = fuel, Everett = produce, raw materials, and anything that doesn't fit with the others. Yo, MassDOT mothership...where's the coordination?
-- Everett Terminal, unlike the others owned by Massport, is privately owned. With a unique situation in that TWO freight rail carriers serve it. If any of those stakeholders starts to do some lawyering-up saber-rattling...or start a swarm of lawyering-up...this will get out-of-hand in a hurry. Multiple private entities...and a very defensive STEP worried about more delays opening up another battle front outside its own Somerville-Medford jurisdiction.
Get on the same page, people. That's the state's own well-laid plans for growing freight revenue that are getting messed with because one hand won't talk to the other. And a pandora's box of private interests with heft, NIMBY's, and outer suburban pols way outside the GLX project scope who are going to start a stampede if they don't fix this. Not to mention larding utterly pointless extra $$$ onto an already decade-late and over-budget project if they have to make a reactive design change instead of a proactive change. This is so asinine and preventable.
