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

Perhaps for the best. Maybe they can go back to the drawing board and redesign it to provision for a 3rd track.
 
Pawtucket train station opens monday
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PAWTUCKET — When commuter trains running from Boston to Providence start stopping here on Monday, they will do more than just offer a new option for travel.

They will also begin reshaping the economy of Pawtucket and Central Falls, which is about two blocks from the new $63 million station.

In fact, officials in the area say that just the promise of the trains has already changed the face of the two cities.

"Within the past few years, hundreds of new apartment units have been constructed in the areas adjacent to the station in anticipation of its opening," Pawtucket's Planning Department told The Providence Journal, adding that several hundred more are under construction or on the drawing boards. "The influx of new development and residents spurred by the train station is helping to bring to life areas of Pawtucket which have been traditionally under-invested and underutilized."

https://www.providencejournal.com/s...ens-how-it-could-change-the-city/69820155007/
 
This will be the fourth train station in downtown Pawtucket. The first two stations were near the intersection of Broad and Exchange Streets along a stretch of track that had several at grade street crossings in the city center. The tracks were eventually moved a bit to the north and sunk for much of its path (same route today) through the city in 1914. A grand new depot with parts of it in both Pawtucket and Central Falls was then constructed further north on Broad Street in 1916. It was an over 30,000 square foot brick and granite beaux-arts style structure that sat above the tracks that are now known today as Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. The station had two levels; the upper level housed the 96’ by 64’ waiting room along with a barber shop, restaurant, ticket office, and baggage areas. The lower level had the outdoor track area with two island platforms providing access to all four tracks. Some 140 trains a day stopped at the new station with an average of seventy thousand passenger departures a month. The station however began to decline in time as less people used the train for transportation with the rise of the auto and it was closed in 1959. It still sits empty today further deteriorating with time. Its location on a bend in the tracks no longer meets station site codes. That along with prohibitive renovation costs necessitated building the new station just a bit to its southwest.


The four train stations in Pawtucket since the 1850's:
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Any ideas why the southbound Pawtucket -> Providence trip is 2x-2.5x longer than the northbound trip?

Migrating my comments from the Pawtucket/Central Falls station thread:

Riverside said:
The big untapped potential in my mind is the possibility of the commuter rail route offering a faster alternative than the R-Line. During the morning rush, Pawtucket Station -> Kennedy Plaza takes 22 minutes on the R Line. The commuter rail should (see below) take 6 minutes, and then add a 7 minute walk from the train station to Kennedy Plaza (though note that an increasing number of bus routes through-run to the station, potentially eliminating the need for the walk), which comes out to 13 minutes.

Particularly with the Downtown Transit Connector in place (providing modestly high frequency cumulative service between Providence Station, downtown, and the Hospital District), that seems like there's real potential for faster journeys. You would need a significant increase in rail service to make it competitive, but the route is short enough that you might be able to achieve 20-min headways with a single trainset and a slightly compressed turnaround time. (Assuming you could get Amtrak to agree to the dispatching impact, which would be non-trivial.)

Looking at the schedule, I am confused. Northbound journeys are pretty consistently timed at 6 minutes. Southbound journeys -- even on weekends -- are timed at anywhere from 12 to 15 minutes, which is 200-250% as long as northbound. Is there any public explanation for this?
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Interestingly total travel time from Attleboro to Providence remains pretty consistent in both directions: Pawtucket to Attleboro is 13-17 minutes, while Attleboro to Pawtucket is 9-12 minutes.
 
I'm glad that Transit Matters exists, and I admire a bunch of what they do. Someone needs to hold the T accountable. Because of that, I'm hesitant to criticize. But whenever the discussion topic involves maintenance facilities, layover yards, platforms and sidings, it becomes obvious that while they are good at abstract analysis (data plots of slow zones, high-level calculations of capacity, etc.) they would really benefit from a deeper understanding of how rail ops work in the real world - and by that I mean not just janky USA networks, but also the Euro networks that Transit Matters adores and frequently cites superficially as examples.

We can all agree that the T should have more "off-peak" services and that the T's plans shouldn't be built around having a huge proportion of the fleet idle at midday. But that doesn't mean that you don't need layover yards or (especially) maintenance facilities. Newsflash: trains, even shiny new EMUs in world class systems, often break down. It rarely makes economic sense to run systems 24/7, and it also doesn’t make sense to have all of your layover capacity OR your maintenance capacity at the far fringes of the network, limiting the ability to deploy resources quickly in the event of a breakdown or outage.

Any sober analysis of the T would conclude that it’s short on both the maintenance AND layover capacity required even to cover its near-term ambitions, and the T’s facilities are woefully short of what would be required to support a network as extensive and visionary as the one that Transit Matters proposes. So where is that capability going to go, boys? If not Widett, where? Widett may not be a perfect location, but in the real world, there are a limited number of possible locations close to key nodes of the rail network with sufficient size and in an appropriately industrial zone buffered from NIMBYs.

Transit Matters frequently makes reference to Europe, but I’ve never seen any evidence that they actually understand how a range of benchmark European systems are configured. Let’s take Munich: Munich’s S-Bahn is a pretty decent analogue to the electrified commuter rail network that we’d dream of having if/when North-South Link is built. As Munich’s population and commuter rail network has expanded, they’ve repeatedly needed to increase their maintenance facilities and storage capacity. The main maintenance facility is a whopping 6 kilometers (4 miles) from the center of the City (Marienplatz). They are short of capacity again, so they are planning another facility almost as close. A huge percentage of the sidings where trains are idled are also relatively close to the center of the network, on either side of the tunnel that runs under the center of the City. This is not by accident. They also have additional platforms at main stations (Hauptbahnhof and Ostbahnhof) that aren’t used for routine service but which come into play when things don’t go according to plan. Munich’s system is configured like this to promote reliability and resiliency, and ours should be, too.

Nor is Munich an outlier. Hamburg’s S-Bahn maintenance facility is only 8 km from Hamburg HBF. Zurich’s is even closer to city center. (For what it’s worth, Zurich also uses bi-level coaches to good effect … Transit Matters is intransigently dead-set against bi-levels because their spreadsheets tell them they require longer and less predictable dwell times, but the precise-to-the-millisecond Swiss seem to manage the tradeoffs just fine).

The Transit Matters team doesn’t seem to understand that even if a perfect-world calcuation suggests that if x units of rolling stock move every y minutes, a network can exist without extra platforms (no love for South Station expansion) or layover yards (no love for Widett), it doesn’t mean that would ever work in the real world, where oily parts and electrical bits fail unpredictably, weather periodically intrudes on ops, human labor isn’t infallible, and operators are obliged to wrangle with mixed fleets during long periods of transition that never really end. Any good system has a contingency plan for virtually every type of failure in any point of the network. My sense is that if the folks at TM actually spent a year working in the bowels of one of the complex European networks with the clock-facing schedules that they so admire as tourists, they’d return with a much greater appreciation for redundancy and an understanding of why investment can’t be limited to stringing up wires and buying some electrified rolling stock.

At the very least, Transit Matters would benefit from having someone like F-Line edit their copy and explain to them which of their assumptions are naïve and why some of their Pollyanna estimates are oversimplified. The frustrating reality is that they unwittingly undercut some of the good that they do in holding the often brain-dead and untrustworthy MBTA accountable and pointing the way toward a better future. Sure, 95% of the public will have no idea how to assess their proposals. But they make it too easy for MBTA brass and engineering geeks who understand a bit more about ops to dismiss them as a bunch of young armchair quarterbacks blogging from mom’s basement.
 
StillInTheHood said:
I'm glad that Transit Matters exists, and I admire a bunch of what they do. Someone needs to hold the T accountable. Because of that, I'm hesitant to criticize. But whenever the discussion topic involves maintenance facilities, layover yards, platforms and sidings, it becomes obvious that while they are good at abstract analysis (data plots of slow zones, high-level calculations of capacity, etc.) they would really benefit from a deeper understanding of how rail ops work in the real world - and by that I mean not just janky USA networks, but also the Euro networks that Transit Matters adores and frequently cites superficially as examples.

We can all agree that the T should have more "off-peak" services and that the T's plans shouldn't be built around having a huge proportion of the fleet idle at midday. But that doesn't mean that you don't need layover yards or (especially) maintenance facilities. Newsflash: trains, even shiny new EMUs in world class systems, often break down. It rarely makes economic sense to run systems 24/7, and it also doesn’t make sense to have all of your layover capacity OR your maintenance capacity at the far fringes of the network, limiting the ability to deploy resources quickly in the event of a breakdown or outage.

Any sober analysis of the T would conclude that it’s short on both the maintenance AND layover capacity required even to cover its near-term ambitions, and the T’s facilities are woefully short of what would be required to support a network as extensive and visionary as the one that Transit Matters proposes. So where is that capability going to go, boys? If not Widett, where? Widett may not be a perfect location, but in the real world, there are a limited number of possible locations close to key nodes of the rail network with sufficient size and in an appropriately industrial zone buffered from NIMBYs.

Transit Matters frequently makes reference to Europe, but I’ve never seen any evidence that they actually understand how a range of benchmark European systems are configured. Let’s take Munich: Munich’s S-Bahn is a pretty decent analogue to the electrified commuter rail network that we’d dream of having if/when North-South Link is built. As Munich’s population and commuter rail network has expanded, they’ve repeatedly needed to increase their maintenance facilities and storage capacity. The main maintenance facility is a whopping 6 kilometers (4 miles) from the center of the City (Marienplatz). They are short of capacity again, so they are planning another facility almost as close. A huge percentage of the sidings where trains are idled are also relatively close to the center of the network, on either side of the tunnel that runs under the center of the City. This is not by accident. They also have additional platforms at main stations (Hauptbahnhof and Ostbahnhof) that aren’t used for routine service but which come into play when things don’t go according to plan. Munich’s system is configured like this to promote reliability and resiliency, and ours should be, too.

Nor is Munich an outlier. Hamburg’s S-Bahn maintenance facility is only 8 km from Hamburg HBF. Zurich’s is even closer to city center. (For what it’s worth, Zurich also uses bi-level coaches to good effect … Transit Matters is intransigently dead-set against bi-levels because their spreadsheets tell them they require longer and less predictable dwell times, but the precise-to-the-millisecond Swiss seem to manage the tradeoffs just fine).

The Transit Matters team doesn’t seem to understand that even if a perfect-world calcuation suggests that if x units of rolling stock move every y minutes, a network can exist without extra platforms (no love for South Station expansion) or layover yards (no love for Widett), it doesn’t mean that would ever work in the real world, where oily parts and electrical bits fail unpredictably, weather periodically intrudes on ops, human labor isn’t infallible, and operators are obliged to wrangle with mixed fleets during long periods of transition that never really end. Any good system has a contingency plan for virtually every type of failure in any point of the network. My sense is that if the folks at TM actually spent a year working in the bowels of one of the complex European networks with the clock-facing schedules that they so admire as tourists, they’d return with a much greater appreciation for redundancy and an understanding of why investment can’t be limited to stringing up wires and buying some electrified rolling stock.

At the very least, Transit Matters would benefit from having someone like F-Line edit their copy and explain to them which of their assumptions are naïve and why some of their Pollyanna estimates are oversimplified. The frustrating reality is that they unwittingly undercut some of the good that they do in holding the often brain-dead and untrustworthy MBTA accountable and pointing the way toward a better future. Sure, 95% of the public will have no idea how to assess their proposals. But they make it too easy for MBTA brass and engineering geeks who understand a bit more about ops to dismiss them as a bunch of young armchair quarterbacks blogging from mom’s basement.
Click to expand...

So I guess that a former Secretary of Transportation is a naive armchair quarterback. I guess a transit consultant with contracts both here and Europe is a pollyanna. I guess the MIT grad program students that work with them have professors that are idiots, because we all know how mediocre a school it is.
You blithely recommend "solutions" that will cost BILLIONS of dollars instead of getting rid of the outdated procedures the T uses now.
TM is not against adequate layover and maintenance facilities but wants the T management to follow their own FMCB's plan of 3 years ago,which they have ignored up to date. Basic service of 30 min, with additional frequency inside 128, which should run all day and not require midday layovers facilities, as if one unit needed attention, it would be replaced by another. Are we in agreement so far?
Layered over that would be some additional peak service. I would expect 3-4 on Worcester and Providence and 2-3 on Franklin, which would be a total of 11 sets at most. The T has plans for the Worcester Line to layover at Beacon, but while the exact site is still up in the air(I prefer west of of the present proposal), that should be sufficient to meet that lines needs. That leaves seven(I haven't forgotten OC, I will get back). I haven't forgotten a 20% reserve either(an additional 6? trainsets) These are assumedly multi hour layovers and could be easily accommodated at Readville.
Back to OC. Presently, 5 trainsets layover at any one time on the OC. The T presently uses the Front Yard, which several people claim that Amtrak will want with their new trains, even though there is not the space and I have yet to see a source for these claims. Even if they are accurate, there is more than enough space in the New Yard(south of track 61) for those and a few extra.
This would leave several tracks available at the Ts Southampton facility for the emergencies you mention.
 
I stand by what I wrote. Yes, I realize that there lots of people interested in urban planning involved in Transit Matters. But lawyers and planners and programmers and community advocates aren’t engineers, or more specifically, engineers with heavy rail experience and, ideally, an understanding of the existing network and infrastructure. Having read Transit Matters’ advocacy – and yes, I do read all of it – it’s clear you are short on engineers who are deep in the details.

I’m increasingly unclear as to Transit Matters’ goal. Is it to gain more influential friends who share TM’s goal of reforming and expanding the moribund MBTA? Or is it to “win the internet” in a series of flame wars with folks like F-Line who understand the real-world challenges in greater depth than you guys do? We shouldn’t be your enemies. We are every bit as frustrated with the T as you are. We are just as keenly aware of financial constraints. If you can’t win us over, then you are never going to succeed when you face detailed opposition from intransigent institutional lifers who understand the constraints far better than all of us.

To set the record straight on a few other points: where did I suggest something that would cost BILLIONS? You must have me confused with that crazy guy in the North-South Link thread who suggested a second rail tunnel tube for the Eastern Route (which really would cost billions without providing essential redundancy). The MBTA would be fools not to pursue at least a partial purchase of Widett – industrial land on a main rail line that you are hoping to expand (and along which you eventually hope to open a portal tunnel) doesn’t grow on trees, and you can always repurpose it as technology and needs change. The $150MM cost is the real estate, not the sidings. I struggle to understand why the Widett purchase is an issue worth burning advocacy time and ink to address – shouldn’t Transit Matters instead be hammering away much harder at the MBTA’s vaporware battery trains? I believe TM is on record stating that proven technology is “preferable,” which seems like the understatement of the century - I believe TM has subjected bi-level trains to much harsher assessment than vaporware trains. Is there an Elon Musk fanboi on the Board preventing you from taking a stronger stand? Or is the topic too technical for you to handle? This issue is far more important to your goal of short-term electrification than is Widett.

As for South Station expansion: the key is to figure out how to open up a few more platforms without building a Taj Mahal. I agree on the need to rigorously control costs, but not to the point of wishing away challenges.

And finally, and most importantly, I thought it was obvious, but apparently not: if you aren’t explicitly making provision for Amtrak’s longer-term expansion needs into your regional rail infrastructure plans, then those plans are worthless. Look at the current Amtrak boarding and load statistics – big numbers, load factors that dwarf those of commuter rail. Sellouts. Remember also that Amtrak is a key to feeding the long-term network you desire, important to winning support of constituencies outside of Metro Boston, and even the support of important people within Boston who shuttle back-and-forth to NYC but never set foot on commuter rail. It's also at least as critical to meeting carbon goals. Sure, if Amtrak wasn't also going to require more space, you could look harder at SSX and your yard options, but that's a meaningless hypothetical.
 
StillInTheHood said:
I struggle to understand why the Widett purchase is an issue worth burning advocacy time and ink to address – shouldn’t Transit Matters instead be hammering away much harder at the MBTA’s vaporware battery trains? I believe TM is on record stating that proven technology is “preferable,” which seems like the understatement of the century - I believe TM has subjected bi-level trains to much harsher assessment than vaporware trains. Is there an Elon Musk fanboi on the Board preventing you from taking a stronger stand? Or is the topic too technical for you to handle? This issue is far more important to your goal of short-term electrification than is Widett.
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This is the part I really don't get either. Even if the T were to transition to the much-more-frequent, electrified system TM wants, that doesn't happen overnight. Given the degree to which next to none of that work has actually happened (and, to the extent that some of it has, i.e. the battery trains, it's been conceived poorly) it's odd that there's so much opposition to the Widett plan. It's almost as if the argument is "we shouldn't need this if we do things properly, so don't bother because we won't need it when we do things properly" without any noticeable engagement with the factual reality that the state and the agency are not doing things "properly".

It'd be one thing if Widett was either extremely-valuable land which would otherwise be put to more important use, or if the T's plans for it rendered it permanently incapable of being used for anything other than railroad storage, but neither of those things are true. It's a cruddy-location industrial area with lousy road access, and it's perfectly feasible to provision for future decking over the storage yards a-la Hudson Yards to use those air rights for useful purposes with better interaction with the surrounding areas. Not to mention the degree to which it has been detailed here by F-Line and others how future reduction in storage space needs for CR could allow them to relocate the bus garages off of more-valuable parcels. What's the downside, other than the irrational fear that allowing them more storage space will convince them to keep their "inefficient" practices...that they're very clearly fine with keeping anyway?
 
StillInTheHood said:
To set the record straight on a few other points: where did I suggest something that would cost BILLIONS? You must have me confused with that crazy guy in the North-South Link thread who suggested a second rail tunnel tube for the Eastern Route (which really would cost billions without providing essential redundancy).
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The great irony here, is that Tallguy is precisely that crazy guy who wants that cross-harbor RR tunnel.
 
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So I fell way way waayyyy down the rabbit hole looking at Framingham/Worcester Line schedules (and ways to provide better service to the Newtons). One thing I was looking at was speed increases due to skipped stops. In short, it looks like, over long distances, the speed increases translate to a travel time reduction of about a third:
​
​
500​
504​
552​
584​
​
Worcester​
4:15​
6:00​
6:30​
--​
​
​
all stops​
all stops​
express​
--​
​
Framingham​
4:55​
6:40​
6:56​
7:05​
​
West Natick​
5:00​
6:45​
--​
7:10​
​
​
all stops​
express​
express​
all stops​
​
Boston Landing​
5:34​
7:07​
--​
7:45​
​
Lansdowne​
6:12​
7:12​
7:24​
7:50​
​
South Station​
5:50​
7:23​
7:35​
8:01​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
WOR-FRAM​
40 min​
40 min​
26 min​
--​
65%​
WNAT-BLND​
34 min​
22 min​
--​
35 min​
63%​
FRAM-BOS​
55 min​
[43 min]​
39 min​
56 min​
70%​
WOR-BOS​
95 min​
[83 min]​
65 min​
--​
68%​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
So... my question is: does the ~35% travel time reduction that exists over the long distances between, e.g. Worcester and Framingham, also hold true over shorter distances? Specifically, could a skip-stop schedule generate comparable time savings as the current "outer local/inner express" model?

(More on that below.)

For the most part, none of the current schedules skip stops one-off, so I looked back at earlier schedules (see spoiler box).
Fitchburg Line, 2019:
  • Waltham -> Porter (6 mi): 13 min vs 9 min -> 69%
  • Lincoln -> Kendal Green (3.5 mi): 9 min vs 7 min -> 78%
    • (this one actually varies... sometimes it was more like 10 min vs 6 min, for 60%)
Franklin Line, 2019:
  • Walpole -> Norwood Central (4.2 mi): 10 min vs 7 min -> 70%
  • Norwood Central -> Dedham Corp Ctr (3 mi): 10 min vs 6 min -> 60%
  • Dedham Corp Ctr -> Ruggles (9.4 mi): 17 min vs 19 min -> 89%
    • (a bit of an outlier, but I think is explainable that both the "local" and "express" versions spend 75% of this distance running non-stop anyway)
  • Islington -> Norwood Central (2.4 mi): 8 min vs 6 min -> 75%
Newburyport/Rockport Line, 2019:
  • Swampscott -> North Station (12 mi): 26 min vs 21 min -> 81%
    • (if memory serves, there is a lengthy stretch of "medium speed" between North Station and Chelsea, which is a time sink regardless of stopping in Lynn)
  • River Works -> Salem (6.7 mi): 14 min vs 10 min -> 71%
  • Chelsea -> Lynn (7.2 mi): 10 min vs 8 min -> 80%
Providence Line, 2019:
  • Hyde Park -> Back Bay (7 mi): 14 min vs 9 min -> 64%
  • Route 128 -> Back Bay (10 mi): 19 min vs 12 min -> 63%
  • Route 128 -> Sharon (6.4 mi): 12 min vs 8 min -> 67%
  • Ruggles -> Sharon (15.8 mi): 25 min vs 18 min -> 72%
The stop spacing on the Worcester Line means it would be about 8 miles between stops on a skip stop on the outer Worcester, and 4-5 miles in Natick and Wellesley. Particularly if we look at stretches of similar length where there is only one intermediate stop (e.g. River Works -> Salem, or Route 128 -> Sharon, or Hyde Park -> Back Bay), it does seem like there is some evidence that would point to a skip-stop timetable still producing travel time savings of around 33%.

The reason I ask, and I need to sleep on this and check my work on this before posting the timetables I've up with, but... if the time-savings hold true in a skip-stop model, I think you can create a schedule that:
  • provides half-hourly service from Worcester at travel times comparable to today's Worcester Expresses
  • provides half-hourly service in the peak direction to the Newtons
  • maintains hourly frequencies to all beyond-128 suburbs, maintaining today's frequencies
  • largely maintains existing travel times
    • (Ashland suffers the worse, with an increase in journey time of 7 minutes; West Natick "wins some loses some" by moving from a combination of "1 fast and 1 slow train per hour" with 38 min vs 51 min travel times, to regular clock-facing half-hourly service with consistent travel times in the middle around 43 min)
    • (Just about every other station maintains or slightly improves today's travel times)
  • simplifies dispatching and removes the need to schedule overtakes -- even while accommodating a super-express "Heart-to-Hub" service
    • thereby also making it easier to potentially slot in additional short-turns to boost Newton freqs even higher
...and (I think) can do all the above using fewer trainsets than today's timetable, freeing trains up, for example to increase Fairmount headways to 30 minutes.

(I think.)

So yes -- does it seem plausible that, for example, skipping Westborough could shorten the Grafton -> Southborough travel time by about a third?
 
Looking for a refreshment on your next Commuter Rail trip?

Earlier today I happened to spot what looks like an Amtrak cafe car (edit: not a cafe car, see below) in the middle of a commuter rail consist:
PXL_20230305_212048778.jpg


I was walking across the West Fourth Street bridge (looking south), so I'm guessing it was just part of an equipment move towards one of the maintenance facilities there, but it was interesting to see!
 
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devnull said:
I was walking across the West Fourth Street bridge (looking south), so I'm guessing it was just part of an equipment move towards one of the maintenance facilities there, but it was interesting to see!
Click to expand...

That's Amtrak's track geometry car Corridor Clipper. Usually runs on the T's lines a couple of times a year.
 
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