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

Riverside said:
I would caution against overinterpreting the T's use of full bi-level trains.

1) AFAIK, the T pretty much always tries to keep train consists together -- if a set has 8 bi-levels on weekdays, it'll have the same on weekends. Different rolling stock may be deployed based on demand, but the consists themselves remain consistent (no pun intended) -- it's not worth shunting things around.
Click to expand...
Yes. Off-peak southside trains run a lot more bi-level heavy than rush-hour sets. And that's mainly because the bi-levels are in much better mechanical shape than the ancient flats, so the flats get "rest" on the weekends. I know on some lines like the Old Colony the off-peaks (even midday weekday) are exclusively 4-car bi-level, and I've heard reports that that's now the norm on Fairmount too.

Riverside said:
2) My vague recollection (@F-Line to Dudley can correct me) is that there's a limit on how few passenger coaches they can run on a single consist, because the coaches actually supply some of the braking power. IIRC, I think the minimum is 5 coaches. Among other things, this would mean that there's not much variability to play around with in terms of consist length anyway.
Click to expand...
4 cars is the minimum consist for braking purposes. It used to be that some lines (Fairmount, for one) had a 5-coach minimum because of difficulty of the 4-packs shunting the signal system, but I think all of the Positive Train Control signal mods have fixed those exceptions (definitely has on Fairmount). The NEC has always been at the 4-car minimum.

Riverside said:
3) At least on the Providence Line, my understanding is that T equipment has an extra requirement to be able to interface with Amtrak's dispatching system (which is why Providence and Worcester sets sometimes get swapped at the last minute at South Station -- if they can't get the PVD set to talk correctly to Amtrak, they'll switch). This is an example of what I suspect is a larger phenomenon: it's simpler and more cost-effective to simply use the same equipment on weekends as on weekdays -- just use the equipment that's already there.
Click to expand...
Semi-true. There's an Amtrak requirement for "traction interlock", which safeguards the automatic doors from being open while the train is in motion. That affects most of the GP40MC locomotives and the ancient/being-retired single-level cab cars. The T complies with that requirement by shipping all of the Geeps and flat cabs to the northside, so southside equipment is currently 100% compliant. The flat cabs will all be retired by the end of 2024, and they've got a plan to slowly upgrade all the Geeps so this requirement can go north eventually.

Riverside said:
4) It's not super obvious to me that the T incurs significantly higher costs by running full-length sets. Presumably the main variable is the number of conductors; so, in this respect, I agree that we have some evidence that the T knows that there is weekend demand.
Click to expand...
They don't. There's very little fuel or electricity expended by pulling a closed coach, and human weight + HVAC electricity consumption is the biggest load factor for propulsion. The main cost is staffing levels, which they right-size by only opening as many coaches as they need. Equipment transfers for the next rush hour happen on the deadest of weekend nights, so there are definitely 6-, 7-, 8-car weekend consists out there running with only a couple cars open. It doesn't negatively impact the bottom line.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
I addressed this in this post a few weeks ago. So long as so many of the MA intermediate stops rank in the Top 10-25 of boardings on the entire Purple Line system, the state is going to have very low motivation for running any RI-centric express flavors. It's flat-out passing up revenue into their coffers on a line that quite likely makes the agency money. It would require Rhode Island to up its subsidy generously to offset the in-MA revenue losses, but for all the RI State House's bellyaching about lack of express flavors in general that's something they thus far refuse to do. It takes two to tango. Massachusetts isn't incentivized on the revenue side, and Rhode Island isn't incentivized on the cost side.

A fuller weekend local schedule in general is probably the first stab at finding a solution here.
Click to expand...
1) I think @Koopzilla24 is suggesting this as a model for all the CR lines, in which case the interstate politics don’t apply

2) No argument about the primacy of Mansfield, Sharon, etc from a weekday ridership perspective, but what I find intriguing is the idea that the demand profile might be different on weekends — e.g. Route 128 might have more latent weekend-only demand than Sharon
 
OldColony said:
Looks good, though it "Buzzards Bay," not "Buzzard's Bay." :)
Click to expand...
1704216494853.png

Thanks, good catch!
 
ceo said:
Isn't the last stop on the Fall River line supposed to be Battleship Cove, not Fall River Depot? (And why is it called that instead of plain old Fall River?)
Click to expand...
Battleship Cove is part of Phase 2, and idk, respectively.
 
ceo said:
Isn't the last stop on the Fall River line supposed to be Battleship Cove, not Fall River Depot? (And why is it called that instead of plain old Fall River?)
Click to expand...
TheRatmeister said:
Battleship Cove is part of Phase 2, and idk, respectively.
Click to expand...
Battleship Cove was in Phase 2, then got switched to Phase 1 in 2017 only to be punted back to Phase 2 in 2018. Its current status is up in the air since there's been no further paper developments with Phase 2. Most likely it's not going to be included in Phase 2 since Phase 2 makes no other touches to the branchlines, and if Fall River wants it they'll have to advocate for it as an infill. I could see it doing well enough at hourly Phase 2 frequencies with new development along Davol St. when MA 79 gets torn down, and with some better integration with the City Hall bus hub. But it will definitely need to have a strenuous advocacy to get back in the game on those grounds.

It's called Fall River Depot because it's at the exact location of the historic Old Colony stop of the same name, which pooled trains from 3 different OC branches into one union stop. It probably wouldn't have made a difference if they just called it plain Fall River, but the historical accuracy is there and the project was hedging on-and-off again on their being 2 FR stops so one-to-rule-all was not in the naming cards.
 
I kinda rush-typed that about a weekend CR express service, apologies for anything unclear or redundant.
Riverside said:
@Teban54 and I should take a look at the weekend ridership, because yeah, this sounds intriguing. I know they've been advertising the weekend pass pretty heavily over the past couple of years, so maybe that's starting to pay off?

I would caution against overinterpreting the T's use of full bi-level trains.

1) AFAIK, the T pretty much always tries to keep train consists together -- if a set has 8 bi-levels on weekdays, it'll have the same on weekends. Different rolling stock may be deployed based on demand, but the consists themselves remain consistent (no pun intended) -- it's not worth shunting things around.
Click to expand...
As both you and @F-Line to Dudley said there's negligible difference in pulling a full consist versus a shortened one and they always operate with only 1 or 2 cars open on most weekend trips anyhow so me suggesting a 4-car train is pointless. They could continue as they do and open up additional cars as needed.
Riverside said:
This is a really interesting thought -- run faster and/or more frequent service to key stations (cities and park-n-rides) to attract leisure passengers on weekends. I think the conventional wisdom has always been that weekend demand is anemic and so you should just run the bare minimum anyway. But you're presenting an intriguing theory: latent demand might be higher but with a different profile and set of needs than weekday.

I'm not quite convinced that 4 round-trips would be enough to be more attractive than driving -- the time differences aren't going to be that enormous for rail vs driving, and 4 round-trips per day limits flexibility. So, the question is, how much more would the T need to do to make itself more attractive than driving?

Looking at the current schedule, it looks like the Providence Line is probably run with two sets simultaneously:
View attachment 46255
These may or may not be literally the same two sets all day -- that's what I'm attempting to indicate with the asterisks, in that these could be the same trains, but wouldn't have to be.

I played around in my skip-stop generator and got the following:

View attachment 46267

An All-Stops and Express service, each every two hours, alternating to provide 2 trains per hour to Providence, Mansfield, and Route 128. Not perfectly clockfacing because the X trip is ~20 min faster (see below), but by synchronizing departures at :29 at Mansfield, the departures at PVD and RTE deviate from clockfacing by 8 min or less. (The corresponding outbound schedule is sketched out in the lower section: the top finish layover indicates the departure from South Station, finish return indicates the arrival in Providence [following the same stopping pattern as the set's inbound journey], and the bottom finish layover indicates when the set is available for the next departure.)

By my read, this pattern would require 3 simultaneous sets, up from today's 2. It would also see all three sets in more or less constant service/turns, as opposed to today's schedule which definitely has "downtime" in it.

But yeah, looking at this schedule... I like. Those express times are comparable to driving. And with return trains leaving once an hour (give or take 5 minutes) all day, you can be flexible about when you decide to head home for the day.
Click to expand...
I got my thoughts a bit crossed on the number of trips. 4 round trips was my idea of a pilot program targeting the higher demand points of the day. However, doing an alternating hourly schedule of express and local trains would create a near-weekday service level and I can't see an American transit agency increasing service too much to induce demand rather than waiting to see the demand first. As-is not many people like to get up early morning on the weekend to go to the city and not much is open yet placing the first higher demand travel time in the late morning or early afternoon. This would also be the time that anyone returning from hotels will have checked out or, in the case of the early afternoon, is coming to check-in. Then the evening and nighttime have their travel peaks when people are returning to suburban homes after a day in town or, later at night, are departing an event like a sports game or a concert. Targeting these times adds flexibility in the sense that people who've had a long day in the city and just want to get home quicker would have the option to spend up for the express. The idea of that could be enough to attract more riders to take the train as they can plan ahead to beat the traffic out of the city and be home quicker. The same can be true in the opposite where someone who wants to maximize their time in the city, can take a train to avoid traffic and then take their time coming back if not in a rush. The ideal scenario would indeed be bi-hourly express trains alternating with local trains all day on these two corridors especially. Amtrak somewhat facilitates this to Providence already for cheap and is actually what I did to get down to Providence that day. It was $14 and took 40min from South Station. I bought the night before but when I looked earlier in the week tickets were as low as $4 for a couple trains.
F-Line to Dudley said:
I addressed this in this post a few weeks ago. So long as so many of the MA intermediate stops rank in the Top 10-25 of boardings on the entire Purple Line system, the state is going to have very low motivation for running any RI-centric express flavors. It's flat-out passing up revenue into their coffers on a line that quite likely makes the agency money. It would require Rhode Island to up its subsidy generously to offset the in-MA revenue losses, but for all the RI State House's bellyaching about lack of express flavors in general that's something they thus far refuse to do. It takes two to tango. Massachusetts isn't incentivized on the revenue side, and Rhode Island isn't incentivized on the cost side.

A fuller weekend local schedule in general is probably the first stab at finding a solution here.
Click to expand...
Do you have more information on what the fare revenue pot split is between the MBTA and RIDOT? I can't find an amount if it's publicly available. The other question is, is that revenue pot split on any ticket that originates or terminates in RI? That's how I'd expect it to be but checking just in case. My thought is to have a PVD-BOS Express be an intermediate between Amtrak and the CR's local train by stopping in both Pawtucket/CF and Mansfield. The stop in Pawtucket would indeed add to your point that it'd benefit RI, but the stop in Mansfield being at the junction between 495/95 adds a lot of park n ride catchment back to the express. The station is already the 3rd busiest in the entire system and almost perfectly splits the difference between Pawtucket and 128.
Riverside said:
1) I think @Koopzilla24 is suggesting this as a model for all the CR lines, in which case the interstate politics don’t apply
Click to expand...
Yes for about half the lines, with the pilot being on the Worcester and Providence. Most lines have a convenient station ridership pattern that would facilitate easy organization into a limited-stop express and others don't really need an express service just more trips (Lowell).
Riverside said:
2) No argument about the primacy of Mansfield, Sharon, etc from a weekday ridership perspective, but what I find intriguing is the idea that the demand profile might be different on weekends — e.g. Route 128 might have more latent weekend-only demand than Sharon
Click to expand...
What I observed to be a significant weekend difference was how many more people were going to Providence than I saw during the weekday peak. This doesn't help the problem F-Line pointed out though. The other thing I do want to note is Canton Junction has significantly fewer weekend passengers since there's no Stoughton Line. It's a somewhat regional park n ride according to the Station Access Study, anyone coming in from further out for the frequency benefits may have just switched to driving or a closer station to their origin for service to Boston leaving the weekend riders to be more locally sourced. Recapturing that more regional driving demographic on the way into Boston at 128 and on the way to Providence at Mansfield could come with increased service via express trains at these stations.
 
TheRatmeister said:
I'm attempting to (somehow) fit the fare zones onto the main CR map. It's very much a WIP, and to be honest I'm not sure it's even possible.
View attachment 46385
Click to expand...
Interesting idea! Yeah, right now it does look a bit weird and hard to read on some lines. I imagine a more realistic approach may be to let different lines have different stop spacing, so that the zone boundaries are of better geometric shapes? Kind of a midpoint between your current map (lines look nice but zones do not) and the official CR zone map (zones look nice but stops on individual lines do not).
 
Koopzilla24 said:
As-is not many people like to get up early morning on the weekend to go to the city and not much is open yet placing the first higher demand travel time in the late morning or early afternoon. This would also be the time that anyone returning from hotels will have checked out or, in the case of the early afternoon, is coming to check-in. Then the evening and nighttime have their travel peaks when people are returning to suburban homes after a day in town or, later at night, are departing an event like a sports game or a concert. Targeting these times adds flexibility in the sense that people who've had a long day in the city and just want to get home quicker would have the option to spend up for the express. The idea of that could be enough to attract more riders to take the train as they can plan ahead to beat the traffic out of the city and be home quicker. The same can be true in the opposite where someone who wants to maximize their time in the city, can take a train to avoid traffic and then take their time coming back if not in a rush.
Click to expand...
Not that I'm an expert in regional rail or on this specific topic, but you did raise an interesting point about different travel patterns at various times of the day on weekday and weekends (that is also applicable outside of commuter rail).

Koopzilla24 said:
Amtrak somewhat facilitates this to Providence already for cheap and is actually what I did to get down to Providence that day. It was $14 and took 40min from South Station. I bought the night before but when I looked earlier in the week tickets were as low as $4 for a couple trains.
Click to expand...
FWIW, Amtrak tickets are often the cheapest if you book at least 2 weeks in advance.
 
Teban54 said:
Interesting idea! Yeah, right now it does look a bit weird and hard to read on some lines. I imagine a more realistic approach may be to let different lines have different stop spacing, so that the zone boundaries are of better geometric shapes? Kind of a midpoint between your current map (lines look nice but zones do not) and the official CR zone map (zones look nice but stops on individual lines do not).
Click to expand...
Yeah I've been playing around with the stop spacing to make it look decent. Increasing the Providence Line spacing make the southern part of map look way, way better. Without making the stop spacing vary on each line it's going to be impossible to make it perfect, but I'm hoping to get it to a point where it's both understandable and not hideous. (I've been using London as a reference because I think it handles a large number of oddly shaped zones quite well.) If I can do that I'll consider it a success.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Battleship Cove was in Phase 2, then got switched to Phase 1 in 2017 only to be punted back to Phase 2 in 2018. Its current status is up in the air since there's been no further paper developments with Phase 2. Most likely it's not going to be included in Phase 2 since Phase 2 makes no other touches to the branchlines, and if Fall River wants it they'll have to advocate for it as an infill. I could see it doing well enough at hourly Phase 2 frequencies with new development along Davol St. when MA 79 gets torn down, and with some better integration with the City Hall bus hub. But it will definitely need to have a strenuous advocacy to get back in the game on those grounds.

It's called Fall River Depot because it's at the exact location of the historic Old Colony stop of the same name, which pooled trains from 3 different OC branches into one union stop. It probably wouldn't have made a difference if they just called it plain Fall River, but the historical accuracy is there and the project was hedging on-and-off again on their being 2 FR stops so one-to-rule-all was not in the naming cards.
Click to expand...
Well, that would be irritating. Battleship Cove (the museum) has poor visitation as museum ships go, because there's basically nothing else to see or do in Fall River other than Lizzie Borden's house. Having an eponymous commuter rail station right there certainly couldn't hurt.
 
ceo said:
Well, that would be irritating. Battleship Cove (the museum) has poor visitation as museum ships go, because there's basically nothing else to see or do in Fall River other than Lizzie Borden's house. Having an eponymous commuter rail station right there certainly couldn't hurt.
Click to expand...

Which is a tragedy, given that the USS Massachusetts is not only a thrilling and awe-inspiring spectacle, but also an engrossing repository of WWII combat memorabilia from both theaters--and a chilling testimonial to the barbaric depths that people can descend to in service to genocidal regimes.

(Also, visiting gives one the excuse to down a few Big Mamie beers--which like all Narragansetts are pretty mediocre--but check-out that great label art!)
 
TheRatmeister said:
Looking better already.

View attachment 46491
Click to expand...
As an idle thought, I know you're using the same technique of alternating bands that the T and TfL uses, but have you considered a contrasting gradient instead, getting increasingly darker/intensity in bands out as fares rise?

Also, 128 needs a little Amtrak logo.
 
Last edited:
Stlin said:
As an idle thought, I know you're using the same technique of alternating bands that the T and TfL uses, but have you considered a contrasting gradient instead, getting increasingly darker/intensity in bands out as fares rise?
Click to expand...
I might experiment some more with the colors once I've got the shapes down.
Stlin said:
Also, 128 needs a little Amtrak logo.
Click to expand...
Good spot, looks like I also missed the plane symbol for T.F. Green.
 
TheRatmeister said:
I'm calling this good enough for now: Here's the CR map with fare zones:

View attachment 46657


Bonus ferries+SCR+CapeFlyer version
View attachment 46658
Click to expand...
That turned out a lot clearer than I thought would be possible.

One thing that's a small problem though: including rapid transit on the map can give the wrong impression about how much that would cost. Someone unfamiliar with the system might think they have to pay extra to take the Red Line from Braintree because it is in Zone 2. There should be easy fixes to keep Alewife and all the Green Lines in 1A, but I don't see how to do that for Quincy/Braintree. (Sorry if this has already been brought up and I missed it.)
 
ritchiew said:
That turned out a lot clearer than I thought would be possible.

One thing that's a small problem though: including rapid transit on the map can give the wrong impression about how much that would cost. Someone unfamiliar with the system might think they have to pay extra to take the Red Line from Braintree because it is in Zone 2. There should be easy fixes to keep Alewife and all the Green Lines in 1A, but I don't see how to do that for Quincy/Braintree. (Sorry if this has already been brought up and I missed it.)
Click to expand...

I think this could be easily fixed by having a note on the legend that says something like: Farezones apply to Commuter Rail stations only.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top