MBTA Commuter Rail (Operations, Keolis, & Short Term)

jklo said:
Ridership must be terribad. Second shift workers that might have taken the train are probably driving or maybe still WFH.

Take the Worcester Line. Outbound the last train is only 30 minutes earlier. But inbound is nearly two hours (train used to leave Worcester at 12:20 AM). I bet the Inbound trains would be basically empty if they continued to run it.
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My recollection is that the last inbound train was basically a repositioning that allowed passengers.
 
ceo said:
Interesting. Did the Downeaster make all the CR stops?
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It stopped at Andover, but then after that continued on its normal route (taking the Wildcat, stopping at Woburn, and then going nonstop until North Station).

The commuter rail train was cancelled for the rest of its trip, so I'm guessing there was a passenger going to Andover, and the rest of the passengers were going all the way in to North Station.
 
Headed out of North Station today, I saw what looked like an old single-level coach near BET which had been half-repainted in what appeared to be New Haven colors. I'll see if I can't get a picture of the darn thing tomorrow or Sunday - in conjunction with the all-black rebuilt F40 would seem to indicate that a NH heritage unit might not be too far away...
 
Wash said:
Headed out of North Station today, I saw what looked like an old single-level coach near BET which had been half-repainted in what appeared to be New Haven colors. I'll see if I can't get a picture of the darn thing tomorrow or Sunday - in conjunction with the all-black rebuilt F40 would seem to indicate that a NH heritage unit might not be too far away...
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Reports were that the coach was used for a movie shoot. It's not an active coach...it was one of the ones in mothball storage.
 
There are two coaches in NH like paint here. These two coaches were used in an unknown film at the old Weymouth Naval Air Base site.
They are the 646 & 1621 and were in storage at Area 52 (i.e. Rochester) for a long time. On July 10th, an extra took them from Middleboro
to Abington (MW Facility). Both trucked to Weymouth.

9/13 One of the Weymouth movie coaches trucked to BET.
9/14 Second of the Weymouth movie coaches trucked to BET.

Rumor is they will be scrapped at BET. Unconfirmed.
 
Super inconvenient changes to the Fitchburg line schedule as of tomorrow. Runs are padded 10-15 mins from the May 23 schedule, with arrivals at North Station at 8:11 and 9:26 (vs. 8:03 and 9:01 before, which was still not super convenient if you have to be somewhere at 9 or shortly after). Yeah, the clock-facing schedules are great in that we no longer have two-hour mid-day gaps, but the schedules are still terrible at rush hour.
 
Some not-so-great comments about the North Station faregates from a railroad.net post:
- Things get messy when passengers have children. The gates will not let them pass with the parent, and an ambassador is needed to let them in/out.
- There are only two trash cans for the entire concourse past the gates.
- There are no restrooms past the gates. There is no signage to tell passengers this. There's also no signage to let passengers know that they're not allowed to go out and back in without ambassador intervention.
- The gates accept Amtrak tickets, Charlie Card passes, tappable Charlie Ticket passes, and swipable magstripe Charlie Ticket passes. There's no signage to indicate that stored value Charlie Cards are not accepted. This is different from South Station where there's a validator that deducts value from a stored value Charlie Card and turns it into a zoned receipt that's presentable to a conductor.
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The EGE said:
Some not-so-great comments about the North Station faregates from a railroad.net post:
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You think Keolis could have predicted some of these issues and had solutions for them in the years between first proposing the gates and them being installed and activated, but I suppose that it's too much to ask for them to minimize the inconvenience they put on their customers :rolleyes:
 
Like everything else with these gates, it just makes it clear how they were done from the completely wrong perspective. Not "with an integrated tap-in/tap-out fare system, fare gates at the busiest stations make sense", but "we're losing money because we don't actually check tickets, so we're kludging gates onto the existing system to attempt to plug the holes".
 
Semass said:
The conductors aren't collecting tickets. This is not a structural problem, it's a human resources problem.
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It probably would have had to wait for the new fare collection system, but it wouldn't have necessarily been the world's worst idea to take the opportunity to re-do the entire CR fare payment system, which could have involved gates at the downtown stations (and validators everywhere) and turned the thing into a proof-of-payment system, reducing the conductors' workload. Instead, we get gates that don't collect fares, irritate customers, can't tell if you're using the correct fare while providing a convenient excuse for Keolis to be lazy on actual enforcement because the problem is 'solved', and (so I've heard) can't even tell if a ticket has been used before (which is a massive vulnerability if true).
 
The plan was always to have AFC 1.0 on the commuter rail “eventually”. However, the T management stopped talking about that at some point, and just gave up.
 
For whatever, reason, on the most recent version (v37a) of the CR map, Pawtucket/Central Falls has disappeared.
 
Big deal: The MBTA board voted today to make an eminent domain taking for the Widett circle sites. Notably not including City owned parcels and roads, but that wouldn't be much of an obstacle, design not finalized pending actual acquisition.
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Wow, that does seem big. New EMU facility? Hopefully they forward plan for some air rights on it, too.
 
bakgwailo said:
Wow, that does seem big. New EMU facility? Hopefully they forward plan for some air rights on it, too.
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That's from an old render from the South Station Expansion EIS. Pretty sure subsequent study has zeroed in on Readville Yard 2 for heavy-repair facilities, as that's a perfect location to headquarter all that and Readville would no longer be needed for much midday/overnight storage if Widett became the primary facility. So we'll have to see once this transaction is completed what their final plans actually are. If it's just train storage it's a cinch to space the tracks for air rights pegs. Buildings (especially maintenance bays which are >1 story tall) are the complicating factor.

Honestly, this is the best possible scenario if you want to see something built there. The Olympics plan to sack the developer with doing the air rights decking was a born failure; it needs state assistance to happen. If they form some sort of air rights trust like South Station had, you might actually see something built over the 'bowl' before we're all dead.
 
FWIW...this is the render that appeared in the South Station Expansion 2016 FEIR. Slightly different from the one that was copypasta'd into the T Board's presentation.

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30 trainsets on the 'bowl' and the cold storage site, only a couple small one-story buildings. If they concentrate heavy-repair facilities at Readville per the ongoing study, you may see a pivot back to this concept. And this concept is really easy to deck over because of the lack of buildings.
 
www.universalhub.com

Widett Circle, once slated to become the heart of the Boston Olympics, could instead be turned into a yard for commuter-rail trains

The MBTA said today it's going to try to buy the 24-acre Widett Circle, which our brief Olympics bid lifted out of obscurity only to return to being the home of low-profile food-processing concerns, to use as a place to store commuter-rail trains between the morning and afternoon rush hours...
www.universalhub.com www.universalhub.com

UHub reports from the meeting that the T is also looking to acquire the City-owned parcels. That would entail the BTD tow lot and some of the Public Works yards south of the main Public Works building. From the 2013 SSX Layover Analysis Report. . .
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Another 10 trainsets of storage. That would beyond a shadow of a doubt zero-out the 8-set Beacon Park/West Station easement, if the main 'bowl' parcel doesn't already do that. And would pretty much swallow what day storage Readville is currently being used for. Alternatively, that land grab could be used for a new bus garage to replace Albany Garage on the other side of 93 and free up that lucrative parcel for redevelopment.
 
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