Green Line Extension to Medford & Union Sq

Lrfox said:
...Blog post on the Orange Line sharing Commuter Rail track as a GLX alternative:

http://greenlinerevisited.blogspot.com/p/orange-line-branch-for.html
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I read this as the Orange Line running alongside the CR in the ROW, the same as GLX would. The blog is not proposing anything crazy. Essentially laying heavy rail track instead of light rail track, running Orange Line instead of Green Line along said track, and consolidating a couple stations.

This is possible, but not necessarily more desirable.

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In terms of "Orange Line sharing Commuter Rail track:"

Orange Line trains can not share track with CR trains. They are fundamentally different vehicles, with different dimensions, different power sources, and sizes different enough that the FRA bans them from sharing track.

That would not be possible.
 
1. Orange can't share trackage with CR or freight due to NRA crash standards, and new cars are needed ASAP and cannot be sent back to the drawing board for this.

2. I believe GLX was also studied as BLX, but the high costs didn't make sense for the expansion as ridership was predicted to be similar.

3. You cannot branch out lines to Union/Porter in a way which gives everyone fair headways. (3 northern branches will not fly, especially when only one connects directly to Wellington)

4. Existing OL and Lowell CR > GLX/OLX/wtfX , you can't justify lowering service from Malden and the various users of the Lowell ROW to provide a slight uptick in capacity for Somerville. The Orange Line already screwed over a transit dependent minority before on Washington Street, and I doubt anyone wants to go through that again.
 
It's impossible if I remember correctly from the perspective of the orange line doesn't have enough capacity to branch and maintain high enough headways to handle the loads north of North Station. As well as the fact that the Green Line was designed to handle very high loads and branches on both ends and the GLX helps balance the system. Also the true light rail extension seems unnecessary to me with the orange line proposal.

Plus I believe and Orange line alternative was studied and rejected.

Also rerouting Lowell Commuter rail to the lower capacity route of the Haverhill line makes no sense because it is not fully double tracked and that requires abandoning the Woburn and Winchester stations and leaving them without service.
 
Rapid transit trains mixing with commuter rail / Amtrak trains will not happen in the US. Ever. Full stop. That there are very good reasons that should be.

Commuter rail and Amtrak trains in the US necessarily mix with freight. That is always going to happen. The outer ends of the Worcester, Fitchburg, Lowell, and Haverhill lines have substantial amounts of daytime freight. Every other line except the Needham Line crosses paths with some. You cannot possibly do time-separation with that level of freight service. So you have to build every piece of commuter rail and Amtrak equipment to withstand a crash with a loaded freight. That doesn't mean we have to stick to the current ridiculous strength requirements - crumple zones work even for freight collisions - but there's no way to possibly build subway cars to be mainline compliant. A subway car too heavy to work as a rapid transit car would still be turned into shrapnel by hitting a string of bilevels, much less 286k-loaded boxcars.

Where commuter rail trains and subway cars do mix is primarily where the Underground and Overground share track. That's not even close to the same universe as the Lowell Line. The Overground uses lightweight xMUs; they're fast-accelerating and swallow crowds and mix well with subway stock, and they would be totally unusable around Boston. They're mostly on segregated track in England, with some mixing with mainline xMUs that are also no lightly built. No freight, no heavyweight push-pulls.

There are other, more subtle reasons why the Orange Line would be a bad choice. In order to maintain existing frequencies to Oak Grove (especially with any future extension to Reading), you'd have to double current Orange Line frequencies from Community College to Forest Hills. That's not fundamentally impossible - the OL ran at 4-minute frequencies until 6-car ops started in the late 80s, and properly configured two-track lines can handle incredibly small headways. (The DC Metro was built to handle 90-second headways through all junctions, though in practice 135 seconds is the normal minimum). But you need a massive fleet expansion with a second Wellington-size yard, a wholesale re-signalling of the line, etc. Forget any cost savings. Plus, forget any chance of higher Lowell frequencies or more Maine service or New Hampshire commuter rail or Anderson-turning xMUs or even maintaining existing Lowell service quality, because all those locally stopping Orange Line trains get in the way of everything.

For all its flaws (cost, politically fucked maintenance yard location), the GLX has gotten a lot of big things right. The station locations are pretty much ideal to serve vast swaths of population, the community path provides a huge amount of station access for a pittance of cost, and ops-wise it's a breeze. The maintenance yard - even if imperfectly located - means reliability will be pretty good for the extension and improve for the Central Subway. And doing is as an extension rather than a full-on line fork means that it's only incremental. You only have to get enough new cars to extend the D and E, etc.

Green Line Revisited guy has zero clue how anything related to railroad ops work. He wants to built impossible tunnels under downtown, reroute everything on the Lowell Line down the Haverhill Line via reverses (a whole bucket full of stupid), forget any sort of freight service, etc.
 
I only quickly skimmed, I'm kinda busy, but they lost all credibility at this graphic:

OLX+connection+4.png


Those "unused/abandoned" tracks are the Grand Junction branch to Everett. They are used every single day by the produce train. So if Boston wants to, ya know, have fruit and vegetables, you need to keep that link intact. This is something that should be known.

Also, the OL has capacity issues as it is; branching will make this worse. You would also need to dramatically expand the fleet.

Using the OL instead of the GL also does nothing to fix the issues with the existing GL, which the current plan does.


Edit: everything everyone said above. To echo The EGE's point, this guy clearly has no idea about how RR ops work.
 
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The EGE said:
The Overground uses lightweight xMUs; they're fast-accelerating and swallow crowds and mix well with subway stock, and they would be totally unusable around Boston. They're mostly on segregated track in England, with some mixing with mainline xMUs that are also no lightly built. No freight, no heavyweight push-pulls.
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Sorry mate, I'm not up on all the technicalities.
I live on the lowell line and see moderate use by commuter rail and freight. I grew up in Dublin. The north/south rail there carries freight, commuter rail, inter city and rapid transit (DART). Why can't they build rapid transit trains that use the same rails and run from Medford to Lechmere? Change at Lechmere for the Green line. If the budget allows, you could still run the D line to Union on a separate track.
 
IF the OL fleet is appropriately expanded, I'd support the OL someday taking over the Medford Line, while leaving the Union etc. branch to the GL. But that's not any way to solve our immediate problem of funding... this is Crazy Transit Pitch/Design a Better Boston conversation material... not relevant to the real-life struggle that is the GLX.
 
davem said:
Those "unused/abandoned" tracks are the Grand Junction branch to Everett. They are used every single day by the produce train. So if Boston wants to, ya know, have fruit and vegetables, you need to keep that link intact. This is something that should be known.
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That's not all. It is also used for commuter rail maintenance-of-way operations and to serve every customer between Boston and Peabody. Not that there's a whole lot, necessarily, but the last thing we should be doing is discouraging more freight (and maintenance).
 
As I read on all of this, especially the blog posts that links to comparisons to similar projects. I think it is reaching to a single conclusion more than any other possible explanation - we are getting price grouched, we are getting extorted by the contractor.

More innocent explanation just don't fit enough.

Engineering more difficult than estimated? Aside from pointing out it is on an existing ROW, similar projects can do it for less.

Underestimated the true cost? A common theme with many projects, but again the above is saying this is not the case.

Feature creep? This actually makes some sense, we added a whole ton of more features between the stations, bike trail, mitigations and etc. But when we look at the reports where we are already overspending, it wasn't on the feature creep stuff - we haven't reach to that point yet.

Corruption (as in politicians pocketing the money)? Always impossible to prove not true when the project is going over-budget. Regardless, there's no sign within the bills unless the contractor charges are going to one of the politicians.

But looking at the reports numbers? The note that Baker re-added the ability to cancel the whole thing and it already been discuss that the re-addition of it is a negotiation tactic, it sounds like the truth is the contractor is bilking every dollar they can get.

We discussed before that the way to contract out is broken. Within the context of the country, its within this league. But we also discuss and pointed out to costs of similar projects that is outside the country and there's another drop in cost. From that point, I have to start wondering it is not merely structural, but maybe the contractor in Japan or Europe is just not willing to push the envelope as much they are here. That while the way we contract out work is broken, our own contractors are just screwing up harder.

And if that's true. The most frustrating thing is then we can't call just them out fully on it. We still have to guise it under bad planning or stuff like that. We have to cut features and delays rather than just saying they making up costs and over-charging. Despite Baker put cancellation back on the table assuming to use it to balance out the cost, he can't make them back down completely. It's going to be a combination of cutting stuff and raising more funds.
 
My belief is that the heavy rail style stations are where the extra expense on the GLX came from, so I don't think running the OL out to Medford--which would require those same expensive HRT style headhouses-- solves much of anything.
 
Just to pile on, if you dig through the website there's an "in summary" section, where the author lays the case out for OL over GL. Some of the modification suggested, not sure if they're his/her's ideas or ideas grabbed from Beyond Lechmere, but among the "service modifications" of an OL spur one can find:

Whacking Lowell Line service at:
Mishawum (agree)
Winchester (no)
Wedgemere (nah, not really)
(rationale for whacking the latter two stops is that they are 2.3 and 1.9 miles respectively from a hypothetical West Medford OL stop)


And reducing Oak Grove OL branch service to allocate trains to the new Somerville branch - that'd present the obvious problems, as the OL is already so heavily weighted towards it's outbound anchors; service levels today are so low that people can't get on at Sullivan occasionally.
 
CantabAmager said:
Just to pile on, if you dig through the website there's an "in summary" section, where the author lays the case out for OL over GL. Some of the modification suggested, not sure if they're his/her's ideas or ideas grabbed from Beyond Lechmere, but among the "service modifications" of an OL spur one can find:

Whacking Lowell Line service at:
Mishawum (agree)
Winchester (no)
Wedgemere (nah, not really)
(rationale for whacking the latter two stops is that they are 2.3 and 1.9 miles respectively from a hypothetical West Medford OL stop)


And reducing Oak Grove OL branch service to allocate trains to the new Somerville branch - that'd present the obvious problems, as the OL is already so heavily weighted towards it's outbound anchors; service levels today are so low that people can't get on at Sullivan occasionally.
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One other dog in the pile

What about using most of the currently completed GLX work for Commuter Rail to Tufts

  • Seems that only small modifications are needed to support double track for CR use
  • add the new stations with far less design issues such as crossing the tracks at grade, etc.
  • run it today with standard equipment
  • later electrifying it and running EMUs on all the northern CR routes
  • meanwhile build only the Union Sq extension to the Green Line
    • sell Lechmere Station to a developer for $ and the construction of the new Lechmere
    • GLX ends in Union Sq. -- station built by developer of major sq. ft. project
    • no need for the costly maintenance facilities
  • overall a major cost saving with still a lot of new service -- a model for more future projects with a lot of private sector contributions
 
^ Indeed - other things being equal, is the value-for-money of NSRL+EMU on lowell and fitchburgh lines greater than that of GLX + NSRL?


(...conceding that we need a new lechmere anyway, and that GL rather than EMU should take over the GJ once the NSRL is done)

(...and also assuming that already-completed work on the lowell line corridor could be leveraged to triple / quad track the corridor for express/local CR /EMU service..)

And are we in a world where we have to choose between GLX and NSRL (at least in Baker's head, for a 30 year horizon?)
 
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Is it really worth trying to reconsider every different option when the Green Line has been the preferred mode since 1945?

- Traditional CR doesn't work well for these kid of close stations.

- EMUs COULD work but that would require its own infrastructure to run the trains which have never been tried or tested in Boston so tack on not just money to built a new yard but also another decade of testing.
- OL is out for the basic opps issues.
- BL is out for the needless added cost of building a subway tunnel from Bowdoin or GC to Lechmere.

The GL is the only practical and affordable option that works for a dense area like Somerville. The costs are high because of the shitty contractors fucking up, not because there are better options or because the stations are too nice. All this talk about alternative plans are a waste of energy. The state needs to renegotiate with the contractor or find another one who can do it cheaper.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...e-extension/2GIx45SiQdXotzJZJtmB5N/story.html
That's it.
 
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vanshnookenraggen said:
The costs are high because of the shitty contractors fucking up, not because there are better options or because the stations are too nice. All this talk about alternative plans are a waste of energy. The state needs to renegotiate with the contractor or find another one who can do it cheaper.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...e-extension/2GIx45SiQdXotzJZJtmB5N/story.html
That's it.
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Fair enough - agreed that if we can't build cost-effectively then everything else is noise
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
The costs are high because of the shitty contractors fucking up, not because there are better options or because the stations are too nice.
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Yeah, I've just sat back in disbelief reading all the posts talking about the Taj Mahal stations that are unnecessarily high-end. I'm not sure what renderings people are referring to, but everything I've seen seems nicer-than-basic but not by much. Maybe MBTA has succeeded in making us think something with an escalator is jaw-droppingly special.
 
Arlington said:
The Globe posted a copy of the GLX presentation that was made to the Financial Management Control Board. I'd rather link directly, to a .gov site but it isn't online yet (AFAIK, please post a non-paywalled link if you have one). You'll have to burn one of your 5 monthly Globe reads (or use incognito mode) to read the report on the Globe site.

They have a table that shows that for most of the contracts let so far, you can basically predict the WSK value by taking the FFGA value and adding 50%.
IGMP #1 $22.6M -> $32.2M
IGMP #2 $12.5M -> $18.0M
IGMP #3 $62.7M -> $116.7M
IGMP #4 $44.7M -> $39.6M (not "construction" per se, but steel beams procurement)

So, yeah, if you're the FMCB, you look at that and pull the emergency brake, or as they actually did, pull it when WSK says it wants $889M for what the Engineer said would cost $487M.
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Quoting this post because it highlights how ridiculous it is that costs increased nearly exactly 50% across the board for the different contracts.
 
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