MassDOT Rail: Springfield Hub (East-West, NNERI, Berkshires, CT-Valley-VT-Quebec)

[DominusNovus]

• The Weekly "in person" / "golden hour" meeting as a team
• The occasional client meeting
• Project kickoff and milestones
• Hearings in front of a regulator, govt agency, or court
• Expert witnessing
• Doing "deals"

And of course:

• Students at weekends

Its not quite 1x a month, but if there was more regular service, there’s loads of recreational destinations that people could use it for. Boston area people could take it to Six Flags, Western MA residents could take it for a Sox, Celtics, or Bruins game.

 

[FK4]

This take shows why moving away from the “commuter rail” terminology and changing to regional or intercity rail is so psychologically important for encouraging more rail travel.

I could be wrong but it sounds like you’re only looking at SPG-BOS as some sort of 9-5 commuter service. It also seems like SPG-WOR is being entirely overlooked here but that’s where the improvements are happening and where the train would take about an hour. There’s also the reality that the Downeaster already exists and people use it to commute to Boston from ME, and the MetroNorth New Haven Line is a 2:10 trip to Grand Central (local train) yet used heavily from New Haven daily. There’s so many other trips that are served between cities outside of a daily commute.

Springfield is the poorest municipality in the state. It already has the best RTA bus system in the state with most routes oriented to funnel to Union Station. Adding 2:10 service to Boston on its own is huge for connectivity to the Knowledge Corridor and higher paying job opportunities for super commuters, but the 1 hour to Worcester is vastly more significant for the Springfield and Worcester regions. It becomes possible to live cheap in Springfield but have a job in Worcester without wasting time and gas on a 30mile traffic slog down Rt9 or I-90. There’s also the transfer in Worcester to local service to places between there and Boston. A regularly scheduled traffic-free transportation option between the cities of Boston, Worcester, and Springfield would be a huge win for the state.

You’re ignoring some unfortunate and stark realities in your comments here: Springfield is not Portland and it’s not New Haven. And Worcester isn’t Boston or NYC. You’re not going to get some huge wave of commuters suddenly “unlocked” between Springfield and Worcester, Boston or NY. Simply connecting dots between poor and rich cities and ignoring the actual distance and the actual constitution of the would-be employee base in origin city doesn’t magically make that city a great source of workers and commuters. And I have to say, it’s these kinds of patently false arguments and the like that gets cynics and anti transit people fired up.

Should we be investing massively in intercity rail? Absolutely. Should we be developing state, regional, and national policies and programs to both encourage concentration of population in existing urban areas and simultaneously to encourage and reward employment policies that do unlock places like Springfield? Yes, definitely. My problem isn’t with funding or building good transit, but about bullshit marketing by politicians spouting nonsense that anyone can see is nonsense. Stuff like this:

“Adding 2:10 service to Boston on its own is huge for connectivity to the Knowledge Corridor and higher paying job opportunities for super commuters”

No, again, as I said initially, 2:10 gets you from the train stations between Springfield and Boston. At the very best, “knowledge corridor” jobs are going to be in Kendall, which is another 25 minutes or more, all told, factoring in train door to office door. And how long to get to the Springfield train station? The real travel time is significantly more than 2:10. So you’re talking about a very rarified type who is willing to buy a home in Springfield and commute 3 hours to Boston on a regular basis. Similar to what you said about “many computers” using Downeaster, I don’t have those numbers but feel free to share—I am confident they aren’t going to be numbers of any significance. Someone who’s anti transit hears stuff like this, and they directly think “that’s ridiculous”.

My point is not that we shouldn’t be doing these projects, but that politicians and non profits and advocacy groups pushing them need to wake up and use different marketing strategies. Telling old steak eating AARPers who pay the state police union to support Trump that 100 million to shave off 20 minutes of a train ride is suddenly going to lift huge numbers of Springfield residents out of poverty is going to lead to scoffing. While some of these people may never be convinced, actually finding ways to develop more visionary future transit policies that can be striven for, and articulating that things like this project are links in a future chain that really will eventually (potentially) help many thousands of people, would be an investment in ideology that I have yet to see. Build better trains and yes you get incremental gravitation toward this mode. This project will make a few more people take the train to Chicago, a few go between Springfield and Boston and Worcester, but the real benefit is laying an ever growing foundation to support a much more robust rail network. I think politicians are loath to talk about huge visionary projects and plans since they’re so much more expensive and therefore liable to be even more despised by conservatives—but I actually think one of the deepest malaises in the United States today is the lack of visionary and inspiring grand plans at a national level. I could be wrong, but paradoxically I think that more people would support these types of projects if they were explicitly about longer term bigger expansions of rail service, rather than tepid incrementalist projects that are oversold on the basis of their most proximal (and limited) benefits.

 

[Koopzilla24]

You’re ignoring some unfortunate and stark realities in your comments here: Springfield is not Portland and it’s not New Haven. And Worcester isn’t Boston or NYC. You’re not going to get some huge wave of commuters suddenly “unlocked” between Springfield and Worcester, Boston or NY. Simply connecting dots between poor and rich cities and ignoring the actual distance and the actual constitution of the would-be employee base in origin city doesn’t magically make that city a great source of workers and commuters. And I have to say, it’s these kinds of patently false arguments and the like that gets cynics and anti transit people fired up.

Should we be investing massively in intercity rail? Absolutely. Should we be developing state, regional, and national policies and programs to both encourage concentration of population in existing urban areas and simultaneously to encourage and reward employment policies that do unlock places like Springfield? Yes, definitely. My problem isn’t with funding or building good transit, but about bullshit marketing by politicians spouting nonsense that anyone can see is nonsense. Stuff like this:

“Adding 2:10 service to Boston on its own is huge for connectivity to the Knowledge Corridor and higher paying job opportunities for super commuters”

No, again, as I said initially, 2:10 gets you from the train stations between Springfield and Boston. At the very best, “knowledge corridor” jobs are going to be in Kendall, which is another 25 minutes or more, all told, factoring in train door to office door. And how long to get to the Springfield train station? The real travel time is significantly more than 2:10. So you’re talking about a very rarified type who is willing to buy a home in Springfield and commute 3 hours to Boston on a regular basis. Similar to what you said about “many computers” using Downeaster, I don’t have those numbers but feel free to share—I am confident they aren’t going to be numbers of any significance. Someone who’s anti transit hears stuff like this, and they directly think “that’s ridiculous”.

{Skip to bottom for TL;DR main point}
You’re looking only at what the present day job and housing market is. The moment that any regular useful frequency rail connecting the three cities is made official there will be people, businesses, and developers looking into how they can take advantage of this new service. There is nothing “patently false” about the reality that just the cities of Worcester and Springfield alone have over 360k people living in them, all with the need for as much employment access they can get and the desire to attract more people and businesses there.

What is a “knowledge corridor job in Kendall?” The knowledge corridor is the name of the CT River region simply because of the string of higher education institutions. A bunch of colleges means that there will be clubs, athletes, and other students traveling for various reasons along with visiting scholars, meetings, lab visits, etc for faculty. Most of the students themselves, not having their own cars. Connecting these institutions themselves with the ones in Boston via rail would get significant use from these regular travels.

Again you’re reducing the full length to a commuter only service but that wouldn’t be the primary objective of the full trip at all. Even if it were, for super commuters, the PVTA is already set up for the majority of routes to serve Union Station. Why a super commuter would buy a house away from downtown Springfield to commute to Kendall rather than get at least a cheap downtown apartment I don’t know but let’s say they did. In your scenario they could drive the ~10min from their house to the Union Station garage or take a 15-20min bus then from South Station it’s 10min to Kendall on the current broken Red Line. Total time ~2:35 which is way out there for a daily but might be reasonable for someone who only needs to be in the office occasionally. I used to know a guy who lived in NYC and worked 3 days a week in Back Bay. But again this wouldn’t be even the primary supercommuting use. That’d be more like a Springfield-Framingham or something in there. It does not mean there will be guaranteed new jobs for everyone. It means there’s new access to a new job market.

The constituents of Western Mass are on board with this project. They’ve wanted it for decades and they feel all development and funding has been going to Boston. There is no negative press around it other than it not being done years ago. Politicians haven’t been marketing it as just a jobs project but an equity project, a project to ease the housing crisis, and a project to stimulate the economy of Western Mass.

 

[markhb]

No, again, as I said initially, 2:10 gets you from the train stations between Springfield and Boston. At the very best, “knowledge corridor” jobs are going to be in Kendall, which is another 25 minutes or more, all told, factoring in train door to office door. And how long to get to the Springfield train station? The real travel time is significantly more than 2:10. So you’re talking about a very rarified type who is willing to buy a home in Springfield and commute 3 hours to Boston on a regular basis. Similar to what you said about “many computers” using Downeaster, I don’t have those numbers but feel free to share—I am confident they aren’t going to be numbers of any significance. Someone who’s anti transit hears stuff like this, and they directly think “that’s ridiculous”.

I don't have the numbers (I imagine NNEPRA does, by train number and city pair), but when I have ridden the early Downeaster Portland-Boston, pre-pandemic, I've observed *some* commuters boarding in Portland, quite a few in Wells, and a LOT in Exeter. Wells is c. 70 miles from Boston via the freeway, so I'm not sure if that qualifies as "super-commuting" or not. I will say that, while NNEPRA's original plans (c. 2000) were for a more evenly-spaced, general purpose service, they rapidly adjusted the schedule early on to accommodate unexpected commuter demand.

Why a super commuter would buy a house away from downtown Springfield to commute to Kendall rather than get at least a cheap downtown apartment I don’t know

Because they can get a lot more house and land (and potentially better quality of life if they don't really like urban living) in western Mass. than they can in Boston or downtown Springfield?

 

[jklo]

Because they can get a lot more house and land (and potentially better quality of life if they don't really like urban living) in western Mass. than they can in Boston or downtown Springfield?

They'd be spending their entire waking hours either on the train or at work. That's no good.

Amtrak's fares are at least reasonable. Says it's $339 for a monthly pass from Exeter to North Station. You would likely have to get on the T afterwards though, and there's only a couple trains per day.

 

[HenryAlan]

They'd be spending their entire waking hours either on the train or at work. That's no good.

Definitely not good if they are doing that five days a week, but I think the concept here is a service for people who do it once or twice a week. A 2:15 type of train trip for those two days may be seen as a reasonable trade-off if the person is WFH the rest of the time in a more spacious residential setting.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Definitely not good if they are doing that five days a week, but I think the concept here is a service for people who do it once or twice a week. A 2:15 type of train trip for those two days may be seen as a reasonable trade-off if the person is WFH the rest of the time in a more spacious residential setting.

People have commuted like that for decades into Manhattan on either the Hudson River or New Haven Metro North lines.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

People have commuted like that for decades into Manhattan on either the Hudson River or New Haven Metro North lines.

People do the not-every-day commute on the Empire Corridor from Albany, too. Hell...the Keystone Corridor and Philly+burbs to NYC, too. Boston may not be nearly as big a market for that as NYC, but flexible work schedule super-commutes definitely are a thing in the Northeast.

 

[HenryAlan]

Several years ago, a co-worker commuted daily from Portsmouth to Boston by bus. And she said the service was usually fairly well subscribed. People have all kinds of reasons to make such commutes, it doesn't hurt to make them easier.

 

[Balerion]

$108 million federal grant request to remove bottlenecks between Worcester and Springfield, adding 23 miles of second passing tracks.

MassDOT Seeking Funds to Add More Frequent, Faster Worcester-Springfield Passenger Rail Service - Streetsblog Massachusetts

MassDOT estimates that its proposed track improvements could enable Amtrak trains to run up to 80 mph, and reduce the time for passenger rail trips between Boston and Springfield to 2 hours and 10 minutes – roughly the same amount of time it takes to drive.

mass.streetsblog.org

“MassDOT estimates that the track improvements could shave about 20 minutes off Amtrak's travel times on the corridor, and reduce the time for passenger rail trips between Boston and Springfield to 2 hours and 10 minutes – roughly the same amount of time it takes to drive.”

This grant has been awarded to MassDOT.

The state of Massachusetts, Amtrak and freight railway CSX received $108 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation to cover track improvements along 53 miles of railroad between Springfield and Worcester.

Once the rail improvements happen, Amtrak plans to add two new daily train trips between Boston, Worcester and Springfield as a first phase of expanding what’s now inconvenient once-a-day service provided by the Boston-to-Chicago Lake Shore Limited.

That will expand to several trains a day going as far west as Albany, New York.

The improvements will enable a new 80-mph speed limit along the 44 miles of rail line that is only single-track. Some stretches of that track are limited to speeds as low as 25 mph now.

The railroads also plan to build a side track in Grafton, Massachusetts, that will improve the efficiency and capacity of freight interchange with Grafton & Upton Railroad and minimize freight train interference with passenger service.

 

[thepianoperson]

So as of now the line has:
Worcester to Springfield track improvements
Ongoing design for the Newton station rebuilds
Ongoing design for the Worcester Third Track project
Worcester second platform construction
West Station (whenever that happens)
Initial design for Springfield station trackwork
Design for a new station in Palmer
Trackwork in Pittsfield (did I miss anything?).
It‘s quite a substantial list of projects in the pipeline, and a very good sign for the future of East-West rail!

 

[Stlin]

So, a couple of things. I read the CRISI grant award as published by the FRA. First off, I am very intrigued by the fact that rather than the Inland Regional that MassDOT was proposing, the FRA is apparently thinking Lake Shore Limited? Which, don't get me wrong would be amazing... but it doesn't make sense right now. The grant program is only going to shave ~20 minutes off? If we could get that down to ~14, 12 hours and not 22, such that it would be a reasonable overnight, *maybe* an additional train, one daytime, one overnight would be justified. but That's not even considering what the Albany split/combination thing would look like - would NYC also get additional trains?

But, interestingly enough, FRA finally published the Record of decision for empire corridor improvements. That had been stalled as a draft since 2014, but finalized this year. If that corridor goes to 90 as proposed?

I'm intrigued - but I'd still be glad to have a pair of plain boring inland regionals from New Haven.

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[dhawkins]

So, a couple of things. I read the CRISI grant award as published by the FRA. First off, I am very intrigued by the fact that rather than the Inland Regional that MassDOT was proposing, the FRA is apparently thinking Lake Shore Limited? Which, don't get me wrong would be amazing... but it doesn't make sense right now. The grant program is only going to shave ~20 minutes off? If we could get that down to ~14, 12 hours and not 22, such that it would be a reasonable overnight, *maybe* an additional train, one daytime, one overnight would be justified. but That's not even considering what the Albany split/combination thing would look like - would NYC also get additional trains?

But, interestingly enough, FRA finally published the Record of decision for empire corridor improvements. That had been stalled as a draft since 2014, but finalized this year. If that corridor goes to 90 as proposed?

I'm intrigued - but I'd still be glad to have a pair of plain boring inland regionals from New Haven.
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Lets hope some of the $ goes into actual infrastructure and not just design. The study has been going on for a while so it would seem like a couple of the low hanging fruit items could be addressed like train signaling or even new conduits, wiring and controls for new railroad crossing signaling..

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

View attachment 43048

That's quite a bit more additional track than I thought they'd be doing. I would've thought they would be doing tri-track by the East Brookfield autorack facility because CSX does block mainline Track 2 when doing switching moves there, but the map seems to indicate that as 'upgraded' DT as opposed to the different color they used for the G&U junction tri-track.

They're certainly getting their money's worth if this is indeed as much new track as graphically depicted. Rail de-stressing to net the track class uprate for higher speeds is something that costs quite a bit given the mileage covered here, so I wouldn't have thought there'd be enough extra in the budget for several miles worth of additional track.

 

[Semass]

There is an agenda item in the upcoming MassDOT meeting for "Compass Rail: Passenger Rail for the Commonwealth". A quick googly search finds a job posting and indication that Compass Rail is what MassDOT is now calling the Knowledge Corridor line and East West Rail on the B&A line. Interesting. Presumably Comm for Commonwealth and Pass for passenger. Will this be our brand for Amtrak run service?

 

[GIL]

There is an agenda item in the upcoming MassDOT meeting for "Compass Rail: Passenger Rail for the Commonwealth". A quick googly search finds a job posting and indication that Compass Rail is what MassDOT is now calling the Knowledge Corridor line and East West Rail on the B&A line. Interesting. Presumably Comm for Commonwealth and Pass for passenger. Will this be our brand for Amtrak run service?

Or Compass for the two lines that cross North–South, East–West?

 

[HenryAlan]

Or Compass for the two lines that cross North–South, East–West?

Almost certainly it's meant to cover both concepts. For branding, I'd expect it to be written as CommPass, with a logo that shows a compass superimposed over a map of the state, also showing the rail lines extending out from Springfield.

 

[lainpimicaja]

Little update on Compass Rail from today's MassDot board mtg: https://mass.streetsblog.org/2023/1...new-passenger-services-to-western-mass-albany

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Little update on Compass Rail from today's MassDot board mtg: https://mass.streetsblog.org/2023/1...new-passenger-services-to-western-mass-albany

All told this signifies a welcome PR pivot back to the NNEIRI study's 'hubbing' scheme, and a rejection of the East-West study's north-south -shunning, BERKSHIRES OR BUST! framing that tipped the hand of the Baker Admin's blatant tank job on that study. This looks like the Healey Admin. putting its stamp on the presentation in a very good way (especially one that'll woo partner states CT and VT back into an active partnership after the shade East-West threw at them).

 

[Riverside]

I gotta say, "Compass" is pretty clever as a name -- works on multiple levels.

(But my question, is it pronounced "compass" like the magnetic thing, or is it "comm-pass"?)

It's really encouraging to see both this and Blue-Red getting more honest and reasonable treatment. Seems to bode well for many things.

All told this signifies a welcome PR pivot back to the NNEIRI study's 'hubbing' scheme, and a rejection of the East-West study's north-south -shunning, BERKSHIRES OR BUST! framing that tipped the hand of the Baker Admin's blatant tank job on that study. This looks like the Healey Admin. putting its stamp on the presentation in a very good way (especially one that'll woo partner states CT and VT back into an active partnership after the shade East-West threw at them).

This is as good a time as any to trot out my "New England Rail" crayon diagram that I've been noodling on for a while:

Thick lines I think are supposed to be something like every 1-hour peak/2-hours off-peak maybe? And the thin lines are "less than that" (probably something like 2-5 round trips daily). The tick marks are supposed to be a vague indication of time -- each mark you pass through means another hour of travel, though even I'm confused by what I've done with it, so don't look too hard.

Includes:

• peak-only South County NE Regional stops for commuting into Boston
• a "Downeaster for New Hampshire", with some trains continuing further north (idk why I stopped at Laconia -- there are tracks, to varying degrees, all the way up to Franconia Notch, with direct service to Plymouth State University to boot -- if you're gonna crayon, then crayon goddangit)
• the "compass" pattern pioneered by NNEIRI
• a spur to North Adams, as a better-integrated version of the Northern Tier proposal
• the return of the Montrealer
• the now-open extension of the Ethan Allen Express to Burlington

My aesthetic sensibilities aside, I think the integrated vision is pretty compelling -- all the more so if we layer in the Cape Flyer, a resurrected Cape Codder with a split to Newport, and a "Newport Flyer" from Boston.

(And yes, I know that Concord NH and South County RI could/should be served by commuter rail rather than intercity rail... I just think those rides are too damn long to be in those seats.)