Brattle Loop
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https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/09...uld-be-coming-everetts-industrial-riverfront/
"DeMaria said he is going to reach out to the state’s congressional delegation to seek federal funding to help clean up he ExxonMobil site. Meanwhile, he is pushing state leaders to install one or two commuter rail stations in his city; the trains run through Everett, and pass by the Encore and ExxonMobil properties, but do not stop within the city limits."
Although it's certainly true that the Newburyport line runs through Everett, the length of its transit is relatively short--just 1.5 miles from when it touches-down near the Encore property, after having crossed over the Mystic, until it exits Everett basically where 2nd Street crosses into Chelsea.
Of that 1.5-mile transit, though, much of it is consumed by a big curve, as the corridor arcs from heading north-northeast to east-southeast. That curve is nearly 3,000 feet, in fact--.6 miles.
So, assuming a prerequisite is that a new station would have to be on a straight section of track, you're left with just .9 miles of the corridor that's buildable.
Of that, 2,200 feet is frontage bracketed by the casino to the east and the Costco/Home Depot, etc. retail complex to the west. Could it go there? I suppose.
Alternatively, it could go right at the 2nd Street crossing, here?
The thing is, if you put it there, it's just 3,800 feet from the Chelsea Station. Does it make sense to have two commuter rail stations so closely bunched like that?
(Perhaps there are other examples in the CR system...)
Anyway: methinks Mayor DeMaria is going to have a hard time living up to this promise, due to in part some of the challenges outlined above.
Yikes.
Vicinity of 2nd Street's not going to work. I don't know if the curve to the west of the crossing is prohibitive for building a station but it'd be a particularly poor siting anyway because of the produce center directly south meaning there's especially little walk-up density (or access) there, and there's nowhere immediately identifiable for parking. Even then it'd be something like 2500 feet from the end of that platform to the tips of the new one at Chelsea - Bellingham Square. (I'm aware there are CR stations that close together, such as Wyoming Hill and Cedar Park on the Haverhill, but those are so old they probably wouldn't have been built like that today, and they're both surrounded by residential areas not industrial ones.)
A new stop can't go next to the casino because of the grade for the Mystic River bridge, supposedly.
This is correct. The grade on the bridge is one of the steepest on the CR (possibly the steepest since they restored the surface track in Medford on the Haverhilll and stopped running through the tunnel with the OL). Any platform built on this stretch would violate ADA platform slope requirements, meaning it would never get a permit to be built. For our purposes, that counts as impossible to build.
Might technically be possible to shiv in a station further north before the curve gets too sharp, but the density up by the highway is appalling, so at best you'd be talking either a station with underwhelming ridership or, worse, a parking sink.
It seems like it would be much more effective pushing for another extension of the Silver line through to Sullivan.
Thinking ultra long term, now would be the time to (p)reserve a north/south ROW through the redevelopment zone. Nothing may come of it for a long time, if ever, but if a new core subway line were ever to happen(say, along the congress st corridor), it would be awfully convenient for Everette to have something to point to to say here's where the line should go north of the city.
This is a better approach than a CR stop. Even extending the SL3 down to the casino as an interim measure isn't the worst idea in the world. Preserving the ROW is extremely desirable. You don't even need (and may not even want) some future subway line. The ROW is of sufficient width, and the bridge approaches still available, to permit restoring the CR to a bridge on the alignment of the former drawbridge just east of the current high bridge, and then giving over the existing bridge to light rail. SL3 becomes the northeast quadrant of the Urban Ring fed from the Green Line via the carhouse junction at Brickbottom and, in theory, able to feed either the Central Subway or the northwest quadrant of the Ring via the former Grand Junction, no new tricky downtown tunneling required. (Though straying heavily into the Green Line Reconfiguration thread.)