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

F-Line to Dudley said:
Not this 400-footer insanity. Somebody on the contracted-out design team flat-out doesn't care about dwells, and Commuter Rail ops apparently doesn't care enough overall to do basic fact-check of the design team's work.
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Remember when they were proposing all the single platforms on the WRONG side? That was absolutely crazy too. :)
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
If they absolutely have to shorten the platform because of blowout costs (though that's a hella dubious claim because platform length isn't anywhere close to the biggest cost driver...egresses and utilities are), then pick something that can berth a 5- or 6-pack matching current Framingham consists.
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Doesn’t shortening the platforms change the amount of egress required? The old concept had two overhead bridges and this only has one - there’s a good chunk of cost savings. For the record I don’t agree with the 400’ platform decision either for all the reasons listed but that may a driving factor.
 
thepianoperson said:
Doesn’t shortening the platforms change the amount of egress required? The old concept had two overhead bridges and this only has one - there’s a good chunk of cost savings. For the record I don’t agree with the 400’ platform decision either for all the reasons listed but that may a driving factor.
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No...there's no MAAB-codified accessibility triggers tied to platform length. Nothing that says "exceed x-hundred feet, must build additional egress". They're simply selling it as a major cost saver when foot-length of poured platforms is not in fact a major cost saver. The transparency has been opaque-as-@#$% throughout this whole process...dating back to the big fiasco a few years ago with the single-side Auburndale design. They're willfully choosing to be passive-aggressively obtuse with the stakeholders.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
No...there's no MAAB-codified accessibility triggers tied to platform length. Nothing that says "exceed x-hundred feet, must build additional egress". They're simply selling it as a major cost saver when foot-length of poured platforms is not in fact a major cost saver. The transparency has been opaque-as-@#$% throughout this whole process...dating back to the big fiasco a few years ago with the single-side Auburndale design. They're willfully choosing to be passive-aggressively obtuse with the stakeholders.
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Yes there is but it's not MAAB, it's fire code. NFPA 130 5.3.3.4 specifies that the maximum travel distance on the platform to a point at which a means of egress route leaves the platform cannot exceed 325ft. You also need to be able to evacuate all passengers in 4 minutes and get from the most remote point of the platform to a point of safety within 6 minutes at NFPA prescribed walking speeds. There are a couple other relevant portions but those regulations functionally require two egress points for a 800 foot platform. I've worked on CR platform designs and fire code was the limiting factor in most.
 
www.nbcboston.com

MBTA commuter train hits minivan in Abington; train service affected, roads closed

A minivan was hit by an MBTA commuter train Monday afternoon in Abington, Massachusetts, leaving the vehicle’s driver injured, police said. The driver, a 45-year-old woman, is expected to survive — she was conscious when first responders arrived at the scene, according to MBTA Transit Police...
www.nbcboston.com www.nbcboston.com
Abington seems to be a hotspot for crossing incidents like this…
 
The Old Colony Division was always the New Haven's red-headed stepchild - they leased it for control of the Boston & Providence and the Old Colony's Boston rail yards, and didn't care much for the rest. Their grade crossing eliminations on the Old Colony were very targeted. They finished the Old Colony's project to eliminate crossings in Brockton - the cost of which turned them off from other projects. The only other significant eliminations were Boston-Neponset, Middleborough, Fall River, and New Bedford - all between 1898 and 1912 - and several in Quincy and Braintree in the 1930s. While the B&M and B&A had a few significant clusters that never got eliminated (Waltham, Framingham, Chelsea, Melrose-Reading), the Old Colony Division was arguably the worst.

Incidentally, that crossing once saw a much nastier conflict. On August 16, 1893, townspeople fought the New Haven, which was attempting to prevent a streetcar company from building its tracks across the crossing. The North Abington station was built by the New Haven as a peace offering - it's why a smallish village had a large stone station by a big-name architect.
 
Well, I spent my evening cataloging every grade crossing on the system. As I suspected, the Old Colony has the highest rate of grade crossings on the system, though the northside (B&M) lines aren't great either. The Old Colony Division definitely has fewer grade-separated crossings as well due to the lower overall density, while the B&M did eliminate a lot of crossings.

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We're definitely going to need to start talking about substantial grade crossing eliminations if Regional Rail comes to town. Dramatically higher frequencies meeting same or worsening traffic and same or worsening driver and pedestrian/trespasser inattention is a recipe for crossing incidents making the front page regularly. The :15 Urban Rail zone in particular is going to be painful because those past B&A/B&M/NYNH&H grade separation megaprojects left pretty much only the toughest, most expensive, most community input-fraught cases left out to the first major service-splitting junctions. And I don't think we're at all prepared to have that conversation about cost and impact because the negative effects won't be fully apparent until retroactively.
 
KCasiglio said:
Best to get that conversation while the spigot is still spouting. Unfortunately I don't think that there is bandwidth to start really looking at this in earnest to prepare an application to the next funding round.
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Community input is where most of those efforts will ground to a shuddering halt. People hate change, they hate visual obstructions, and when it comes to pruning purely superfluous crossings they are weapons-grade lazy about preferring their car shortcuts. It's prevented any action on the Framingham clusterfuck for 130 years and 40 studies, but it's holding them back even on some of the non-tough cases. A few years ago I did a little armchair analysis of Rockport Branch crossings and was gobsmacked at the number of wholly useless, redundant crossings still remaining on the line that could just be outright barricaded at little to no impact. Just utterly stupid, have-no-right-to-exist crossings. Maybe it was because the Old Colony service restorations pruned a lot of superfluous crossings on Greenbush and Plymouth while the Gloucester Branch being in continuous service prevented that, but weapons-grade NIMBY's even blocked private owner B&M's last serious post-Wartime efforts at pruning crossings during the rise of the car era. Ops would be so much more fluid and less dangerous if you could do targeted closures on a branch like that, but the community input is where those things go to die.

Maybe the towns need to get a taste of tough medicine and see what a few years of :15 and :30 service does to their quality of life around the crossings. But probably the state just needs to play a much stronger hand at smashing the NIMBY opposition around safety issues such as this. At any rate, the impacts are going to be huge and I don't think we are well-prepared to have that conversation yet.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Community input is where most of those efforts will ground to a shuddering halt. People hate change, they hate visual obstructions, and when it comes to pruning purely superfluous crossings they are weapons-grade lazy about preferring their car shortcuts. It's prevented any action on the Framingham clusterfuck for 130 years and 40 studies, but it's holding them back even on some of the non-tough cases. A few years ago I did a little armchair analysis of Rockport Branch crossings and was gobsmacked at the number of wholly useless, redundant crossings still remaining on the line that could just be outright barricaded at little to no impact. Just utterly stupid, have-no-right-to-exist crossings. Maybe it was because the Old Colony service restorations pruned a lot of superfluous crossings on Greenbush and Plymouth while the Gloucester Branch being in continuous service prevented that, but weapons-grade NIMBY's even blocked private owner B&M's last serious post-Wartime efforts at pruning crossings during the rise of the car era. Ops would be so much more fluid and less dangerous if you could do targeted closures on a branch like that, but the community input is where those things go to die.

Maybe the towns need to get a taste of tough medicine and see what a few years of :15 and :30 service does to their quality of life around the crossings. But probably the state just needs to play a much stronger hand at smashing the NIMBY opposition around safety issues such as this. At any rate, the impacts are going to be huge and I don't think we are well-prepared to have that conversation yet.
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It's shocking that the Eastern Ave crossing still hasn't been eliminated, despite being previously identified as one of the top priorities for crossing elimination.
 
Well, I guess this is the other shoe dropping regarding the Newtonville platform length news. It's good to see the MBTA looking at :30 service on the Worcester Line (though it's not clear to me exactly what that means in terms of the multiple service patterns that already exist on the line), but locking the line into four-car trainsets doesn't scream "futureproofing" to me, to say the least.

How much electric infrastructure would the T need to install on the Worcester Line by 2026 in order to run BEMUs?

Worcester Line Trains Will Get Shorter – But Also More Frequent

Within the next few years, the MBTA plans to start running shorter, 4-car trains on the Worcester Line – but the reduction in capacity in each train would be offset by simultaneous plans to run more trains, with departures every 30 minutes, between the Commonwealth's two biggest cities.
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One of our readers tipped us off that the T's plans for a shorter 4-car platform at Newtonville would clash with the Federal Transit Administration's accessibility rules, which require new federally-funded stations to include "access to all accessible cars available to passengers without disabilities in each train using the station" and "level-entry boarding to all accessible cars in each train that serves the station."

When we asked the agency about this conflict, an MBTA official speaking "on background" responded that the T "plans to adopt a shorter 4-car BEMU (battery-electric multiple unit) consist, which would put every door on a 400-foot platform."
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The official added that the T has already "received permission from the FTA to construct short high-level platforms at North Wilmington and Lynn Interim stations, and we are looking to expand the concept elsewhere on the system where accessibility improvements are needed and where we are planning to operate shorter trains in the future."
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"We’re looking to move to 30-minute train service on the Worcester main line in the next year or so," said Lynsey Heffernan, the MBTA's Chief of Policy & Strategic Planning, during a discussion of a proposed new rail layover facility in Allston at a December 5 meeting of the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization.

Heffernan later clarified that running 30-minute service on the Worcester Line likely wouldn't happen until 2026, and that the agency's ability to run more trains would be contingent on "infrastructure investments along the course of the line that we’ve been doing."
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Balerion said:
Well, I guess this is the other shoe dropping regarding the Newtonville platform length news. It's good to see the MBTA looking at :30 service on the Worcester Line (though it's not clear to me exactly what that means in terms of the multiple service patterns that already exist on the line), but locking the line into four-car trainsets doesn't scream "futureproofing" to me, to say the least.

How much electric infrastructure would the T need to install on the Worcester Line by 2026 in order to run BEMUs?

Worcester Line Trains Will Get Shorter – But Also More Frequent
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I could be wrong, but this seems to only imply that 30 minute headways and 4-car diesel sets will (optimistically) happen by 2026. BEMUs are almost certainly not going to be used for any Commuter Rail service before the Fairmount Line pilot in 2028.
 
Balerion said:
locking the line into four-car trainsets doesn't scream "futureproofing" to me, to say the least.
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Agreed. Boosting frequencies while decreasing trainset lengths doesn’t suggest they’ll be moving substantially more people along the corridor each day, so this isn’t addressing future capacity needs. Hopefully they at least leave space for future platform lengthening in the station designs.
 
riptide said:
Agreed. Boosting frequencies while decreasing trainset lengths doesn’t suggest they’ll be moving substantially more people along the corridor each day, so this isn’t addressing future capacity needs. Hopefully they at least leave space for future platform lengthening in the station designs.
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Right. If it's possible to extend the platform later, along with adding secondary egress, then I don't think this is really an issue for the short term. Long term, of course, the other possible solution would be sticking with 4 car trains, but on 15 or 20 minute headways.
 
HenryAlan said:
Right. If it's possible to extend the platform later, along with adding secondary egress, then I don't think this is really an issue for the short term. Long term, of course, the other possible solution would be sticking with 4 car trains, but on 15 or 20 minute headways.
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Remember that improving frequencies should do more to improve ridership than just splitting the 8-car hourly train into two 4-car trains. More frequent trains will make the system more useful as an alternative to driving. But it seems like running 4-car double deckers with a couple trains a day standing room only should be enough to satisfy ridership for the time being.
 
Natick Center reconstruction is now slated to be completed in May 2025.
Scope: This project will make Natick Center Station fully accessible. The two inaccessible low level platforms will be replaced with relocated, full high-level platforms accessible by elevators and ramps. The relocation work is necessary to facilitate the installation of a third track. Update: Construction is approximately 70% complete. Upcoming work includes the installation of elevators on the inbound and outbound sides of the station, complete platform panel installation, pedestrian bridge installation. Construction is expected to be completed in May 2025.
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Winchester Center full opening is scheduled for July 2025:
Scope: This project will make Winchester Center Station fully accessible. The station design includes full high-level platforms, canopies, elevators, and ramps. Update: Construction is approximately 80% complete. On October 1, 2024, portions of the inbound and outbound platforms – approximately 320 ft. of each – opened for service (both fully accessible). The full station opening—at which time the entirety of both platforms will be open and accessible—is expected in July 2025
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(source)
 
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400-foot platforms at Waverley like Newtonville?
Scope: This project will make Waverley accessible through the construction of a raised platforms and elevators and/or ramps. 2024 Status: The MBTA has begun to update potential design solutions for the station that were identified in 2014. In addition to 800 foot platforms, the design team will also be pulling together concepts for 400 foot platforms. It is expected the concepts and cost estimates will be completed in December 2024. With this information in hand, the MBTA will work to develop a delivery strategy as well as a funding strategy.
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(source)
 
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themissinglink said:
400-foot platforms at Waverley like Newtonville?

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Given that Waverley is on an a nuthin' but end-to-end locals schedule including all rush-hour consists, an equally stupid decision. In a :15 Urban Rail future, only 50% of the slots would be shorties turning at 128; the rest are load-bearing for Littleton and Wachusett. The last thing you want to do is slow down boarding/alighting on the most-packed runs on the system's longest-by-far line. It's an abject failure at stripping out excess schedule padding for dwells.

They're flailing at construction cost control as the end result of too many years of too-little internal oversight. This isn't the way it's going to come down; soft costs are where the bloat is running out-of-control.
 
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