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

DBM said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.)

Scalziand said:
A new stop can't go next to the casino because of the grade for the Mystic River bridge, supposedly.
Click to expand...

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.

Scalziand said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.)
 
Brattle Loop said:
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.
Click to expand...

This. The overwhelming majority of Everett's population lives north of the route 16 corridor, as Mayor DeMaria is surely aware. Only a small handful of those folks, on the fringe of streets adjacent to route 16, would find it convenient to walk to a new CR station, given that route 16 itself already veers off by nearly 1,500 feet from the CR corridor as the two march eastward toward the Chelsea line. Thus, until/unless huge residential cohort emerges in Everett, south of route 16, building a new CR station strikes me as the most cynical of gestures....
 
Scalziand said:
A new stop can't go next to the casino because of the grade for the Mystic River bridge, supposedly.
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.
Click to expand...

Kind of too bad - around the Home Depot/Casino screams transit stop for TOD ala Assembly Square (or even South Bay) to me.
 
ulrichomega said:
Would an island platform work for these stations? I don't remember hearing that discussed, but it would save on elevators and space at the cost of additional trackwork.
Click to expand...

IIRC center platforms were considered but opted against because they would have necessitated bridge modifications at each of the stations and they would've taken longer to construct.
 
Scalziand said:
Hmm. According to the Google earth DEM, the grade extends to about where the Home Depot is. I assumed it went farther.
Click to expand...
The track is up on a viaduct for a while, so a topo map wont tell the whole picture
 
F-Line addressed the unbuildability of the Casino/Home Depot site several times. It is worth searching our site for it
 
DBM said:
This. The overwhelming majority of Everett's population lives north of the route 16 corridor, as Mayor DeMaria is surely aware. Only a small handful of those folks, on the fringe of streets adjacent to route 16, would find it convenient to walk to a new CR station, given that route 16 itself already veers off by nearly 1,500 feet from the CR corridor as the two march eastward toward the Chelsea line. Thus, until/unless huge residential cohort emerges in Everett, south of route 16, building a new CR station strikes me as the most cynical of gestures....
Click to expand...
Commuter rail is a regional service. The new Chelsea station is on the border of Everett where a number of new housing developments is planned. I don't think it makes sense to have a 2nd stop so closeby in the area. Additional closeby stops hurts service for people from Salem/Beverly, which constitutes the majority of ridership on the line as the 2 busiest commuter rail stations in Massachusetts outside of Boston/Cambridge.
 
So, looking at a USGS topo map, the northern end of the bridge viaducts is exactly at 10ft high. Am I misreading it? If from that point you had a 2% slope you could drop the track 16.6 ft in 830ft of track. If you then had a 800ft platform with a 1% slope you could drop the track another 8ft. There is another 200ft to the freight switches, and then 1800ft to the Broadway bridge. Even a 1% slope there would give you another 20ft. That's 44ft. I am unclear on how you can't put a station in there? I'm not a topo expert(or great at math), so if my calculations are off, or if there is some FRA rules regarding slopes at switches, please inform me. Screenshot_20211001-132430.png
 
And, of course, now that the T is contemplating extending the SL3, keeping Chelsea CR where it was and adding a new station a 2nd St might have been a better bet. There are a number of dense housing units coming soon, and several acres of developable land just north of the station. Also, the Boston Market produce company just got the boot
 
And have an expectation that the T plan more than 6 months in advance(I know, I AM such a dreamer....)
 
Tallguy said:
Been trying without success.
Click to expand...

Actually, yeah. I'm having trouble finding almost anything with search older than a few days. Going to F-Line's profile is also of no use. Using Google instead gives me some comments +/- a few pages here.

TL;DR it's the freight switch that causes the real issues. I'm not entirely willing to take his word for it that there's no solution possible, but it definitely would require some major work with that switch. I find it hard to believe that, with enough money, you couldn't simply regrade the entire area to better match the requirements of a station (i.e. lifting everything a bit so that you can lower the required grade and then making use of space over towards the Broadway bridges to bring everything back down), but that's a much large undertaking than simply regrading the track between the switch and the bridge.
 
ulrichomega said:
Actually, yeah. I'm having trouble finding almost anything with search older than a few days. Going to F-Line's profile is also of no use. Using Google instead gives me some comments +/- a few pages here.

TL;DR it's the freight switch that causes the real issues. I'm not entirely willing to take his word for it that there's no solution possible, but it definitely would require some major work with that switch. I find it hard to believe that, with enough money, you couldn't simply regrade the entire area to better match the requirements of a station (i.e. lifting everything a bit so that you can lower the required grade and then making use of space over towards the Broadway bridges to bring everything back down), but that's a much large undertaking than simply regrading the track between the switch and the bridge.
Click to expand...
Agreed, but Encore has been throwing money around like a drunken sailor.......
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top