North St. is already quadrant at the sidewalk level, since it has the mini sidewalk gates on the opposite sides of the main gates. Birch (where this hit took place) has 3 of 4 sidewalk sides gated, omitting only the awkward intersection with Railroad St. where the road crossing bleeds into the track crossing. Unless this guy was crossing specifically on the Railroad St. side of Birch, he willfully evaded a gate. He definitely willfully evaded the horn, bells, lights, and appearance of the gates closing on 3 of 4 sides regardless, so it's tough to rule that one a loophole.
Probably still on the roster.Another special paint job applied to a rehabbed GP40MC. This one celebrates the original T locomotive scheme with the yellow stripes:
View attachment 61257
Original scheme on an F40PH, 1979:
Scrapped in 2021 with most of the 1978-ordered fleet. The original F40PH "Screamers" weren't rebuilt again despite the general immortality of the F40 lineage because they lacked separate HEP generators like the later and still-going 1987-88 and 1991-93 orders and had to run the prime mover at full throttle at all times when providing electricity to coaches, making them loud-as-hell smoke belchers with absolute ass fuel efficiency including when idling at stop. Would've required expensive carbody mods to fit in the separate generator, and they were really beat up in general from lack of preventative maintenance so another refurb priced out much too high to attempt. There's still 2 of them sitting very heavily parts-stripped in Rochester awaiting sale for scrap, but they were all retired 10 years ago when the HSP-46 order was fulfilled.
It was never quad track through Quincy into Braintree. The quad track ended just south of Atlantic station in the very northern portion of Quincy, where the Granite branch split off. Below that the Quincy - Braintree main was double track. Now whether the New Haven ever owned a right-of-way wide enough for four tracks through Quincy is another question. Apparently the New Haven's right-of-way was wide enough to permit the construction of today's Red Line, plus reserving space for a single track freight track (if the need arose), which was ultimately used for the MBTA's Old Colony commuter rail main line.
Oh, thank you.
Do we have theories on why the North side has had a harder time recovering ridership?
Line by Line passenger counts:
As @The EGE suggests, my theory (based purely on vibes, I haven't actually checked any data) is that the northside had a lot (like, the vibes are a lot) of closures, which would have disrupted habit formation.
That's fascinating that Middleboro had essentially exactly the same numbers in '18 and '24. (And to a lesser extent, Needham.) I wonder what the station-by-station breakdowns are.
Roughly eyeballing the write-up, it looks like ridership recovery is worst at stations that were most reliant on park and ride pre-COVID. This seems about right, with hybrid work making monthly CR passes less attractive, especially if you already own a car. Looking at appendices 1 & 2 from a 2018 MPO park and ride study, ridership at CR stations that had the most cars parked seems to have suffered particularly poorly. Some examples:
This is very much anecdotal, but I suspect that Needham's strong performance is tied to the regional rail style schedule change. Hourly clock facing, while not show up and go, is at least an easy to remember, reliable option throughout the day. I work from home mostly, but I do find myself using the Needham Line from Roslindale far more often than used to be the case, and it's specifically to take advantage of the express level service to downtown in the middle of the day or late afternoon at predictable times. And what I've noticed is that there are usually a lot of other riders on those previously off schedule time slots. Regional rail scheduling, even if still too few trains in total > commuter focused scheduling.
Is sorting by line and service date not the (right) passenger counts? Obviously you would have to average the numbers but they have estimated daily boardings.
Looks like it got updated overnight. There wasn't anything in the "Fall 2024" season or a "stop_time" in 2024. Glad the data is there now and it will be interesting to dig into.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a super strong trend between parking size and ridership (unless I set this up incorrectly), other than the largest park and rides having some of the highest declines in ridership:
