Just because an 'official' study was conducted and now data concerning that study is committed to documentation doesn't mean that you or I or anyone else can't take issue with any part of that study.
But...if you are disputing data, you have to substantiate your position with your own. Intensity of belief doesn't cut it. If the experts produce reams of data saying this is possible, that it's fine, that it's surplus to requirement for the demand forcast...you can't just say "That's crap...you're wrong...build this because I say so." It doesn't work that way. And if it ever did, you still have to explain how you plan to get elected Planning God.
In this case, since the study never had rapid transit levels of service as the goal, I am here taking objection to that. I think if you conduct an official study based on a flawed or incomplete hypothesis, then your methodology is flawed and therefore the study itself has flaws.
See my South Station intermixing explanation. What part of that is unclear? You
can't run full rapid transit headways on the commuter rail system to a union station that mixes every manner of schedule from a clock-facing DMU to conventional commuter rail to conventional Amtrak to HSR from close to 20 different service patterns on common lead tracks. Can't. Physically impossible. Boston's hub-and-spoke RR lines are not set up that way, can't be remade into something different. What you want is not what a DMU line into a conventional union station is supposed to do.
If you are disputing the data, you are disputing the entire purpose and mechanics of the Indigo Lines and the network they run on. You want an entirely different mode than DMU. Your beef is not with the "studies". Your beef is that it's not a Red Line branch.
Can't help you there. It's not a Red Line branch. No magic wand's going to turn it into a Red Line branch.
I can't conduct studies as one person to determine what the actual impacts and benefits of running 8+ local peak hour TPH over Fairmount would be. What I can do is the math to make an initial assertion that there's no technical barriers to doing it based on reasonable assumptions about rolling stock that hasn't been procured yet, make an assertion based on community attitudes that 8 TPH is something they would very much like to have, and call for an official study to either confirm what I'm asserting or confirm that I'm wrong based on data procured with the actual goal being to answer the question I asked, as opposed to data from prior studies asking and answering unrelated questions - like Fairmount Corridor initiatives that weren't undertaken with xMUs in mind.
Show us your math, then. You're not doing that. All you're saying is that you believe harder than the studies. It's not enough to say "8 TPH". You have to show WHY that figure is important and what actual demand it serves that the studies don't.
This is not a contest to see who believes hardest. If you refuse to accept the possibility that the data is accurate or in the ballpark and let that moderate your urgency, then you have to account for the difference in urgency with some empirical data. That doesn't require commissioning your own million-dollar study. It means stepping back from this purely emotional argument you're making and working from some knowns, not beliefs.
You're not doing that. At all. On any of these rants.
What are the actual obstacles to running freight trains through high-level platforming tracks? They manage it in New Haven just fine, I've watched it happen in person before.
Standard-size tankers, boxcars, hoppers, etc. can fit through a full-high just fine. So can low trailers that hold shipping cubes, so long as the platform has an underhang the trailer can slip under. Sizes go by "Plate" classification (Wikipedia's got an article on it, but I don't quite grasp some of the more esoteric details). Middleboro Line, Route 128 station, and Eastern Route in Lynn have large amounts of weekly freight passing through the full-highs, and Fairmount is fully cleared for Southie port containers.
However, the wide-load freight that comes in on the gigantic intermodal trains from Albany which continue in much lesser numbers to Framingham on the Worcester Line get some of those bigger cars (whatever "Plate" designation those are). And then thru-routes some of them in further diluted quantities to Readville and Middleboro Yards. Therefore the Franklin Line, Framingham Secondary, Middleboro Secondary, and NEC Mansfield-Attleboro are designated clearance routes. The only full-highs allowed are the ones with passing tracks, like Anderson on the Lowell Line, or Worcester Union Station, what Mansfield and Taunton Depot are scheduled to get, or what Foxboro might get. When no space is available--and there isn't on the Franklin Line--the only alternatives are mini-highs or
gauntlet tracks. Gauntlets have to be used sparingly--usually if there's only a one-station blocker on the whole line--because they force a speed restriction, are difficult to maintain, and carry slightly elevated derailment risk that you really don't want around a platform. The only gauntlet planned on a New England commuter rail line is T.F. Green station on the current platform track for P&W to get by with its autoracks from Port of Davisville...but only if Amtrak picks it up as a full-time stop and all the station tracks get platformed.
Otherwise, it all requires mini-high platforms with a special collapsible platform edge, like this one at Westborough station:
When the freight train approaches, it stops at the station and a crew member hops out to flip a trap door level that collapses the edge. Train passes platform, crew member resets the edge, hops back on. Rinse, repeat at the next station. This can't be done on full-highs because they're too long to support the weight of a collapsible edge, allow for the crew to work the edge, or accommodate any form of shifting edge if there's so much as 1 degree of curve on the platform. Therefore, you'll never see a full-high on a freight clearance route unless there's a passing track. Foxboro may get one, but there's no way to modify all 10 affected Franklin stations for that when the line was never more than 2 track.
Also...consider the stop moves that have to be made at each station to flip the platform. That's fine for Franklin which only gets at most 2 off-peak freight round trips per day, and has wide stop spacing. But you can't exactly pack it full of stops every half-mile before a freight train starts clogging up the line. Caveat for any Lowell DMU enthusiasts with a jones for going infill-crazy. And someday when the Worcester Line hits mega utilization on its outer half they're going to have to tri-track through Ashland, Southborough, Westborough, and Grafton stations and bypass Framingham behind the station to keep those wide-load Framingham freights cruising through at 60 MPH instead of having to stop and flip the platform levers.
This restriction can't be bargained away. CSX is by-law granted perpetual rights for wide freights under legacy agreements, including the terms of sale when the state originally bought the Franklin Line. These are protected by full force of interstate commerce laws and can't be forced, eminent domained, intimidated...whatever...from their cold dead hands. Only CSX can voluntarily decide to abdicate a clearance route, like they have now with the Worcester Line east of Framingham. But that's not going to happen here because this is the last entry-point into Boston for those cars, and the state reaffirmed that Franklin + Framingham Secondary were not only protected routes but that they'd get state assistance for future upgrades.
It's a reasonable assumption to make when the plan is marketing itself as transitional to full rapid transit or as a replacement to a dedicated rapid transit corridor that the corridor operates to a certain degree as full rapid transit.
Then you completely misunderstood the very detailed explanation I gave of what the DMU mode is and why it can't. That is not a reasonable assumption. If you want to claim that in the face of operational reality, it's denial. Pure and simple.
And I'm not the only person making the assumption that Fairmount needs rapid transit or an approximation of rapid transit. The community and the advocacy groups that have sprung up around Fairmount Indigo want an approximation of rapid transit, too.
"Approximation". As in, there is no corridor for building rapid transit so 15 minutes is the best that's achievable sharing South Station.
10 minutes during the peak is "good enough" - it's transitional, it's transformative - but it isn't rapid transit.
No, it isn't rapid transit. Because nobody said it was supposed to be. Except apparently you. See above and above and above.
If Indigo isn't good enough for Lynn, it's not good enough for Fairmount. That's my problem. We agree that it isn't good enough for Lynn.
Then what's the solution? Fairmount can't get the Red Line. The corridor's needed for freight because the economy's dependent on growth of Port of Southie, and it can't be expanded beyond 2 tracks north of Cummins Hwy. without taking houses. Which clearly is not good or acceptable for Dorchester.
Does it HAVE to be one linear line? How about 15 min. headways boosted with more frequent east-west buses hitting these stations...or the Urban Ring dinging Newmarket? Dorchester isn't this thin linear strip. Fairmounties need to get east and west in large quantities too with the humongous density of the neighborhood. I would argue they'd be more displeased with too hyper-focus on making Fairmount unsurmountably perfect if that drew too much oxygen away from the need for much more robust E-W Yellow Line service crossing the neighborhood and transferring at these stations.
Rapid transit through Fairmount is not physically impossible. Rapid Transit through Fairmount is also not fiscally impossible/imprudent/extreme. I don't think it's worthwhile to do so when the line as it is today could more than easily support 12, 16, 20, even 24 TPH if everything runs local on it; but we know enough about what's under South Station and the terminal approach tracks to make converting the entire Fairmount Line post-DMU enhancements into a Red Line branch only a matter of severing the Franklin Line's connection to it, electrifying it, and tunneling it into South Station Under from around Newmarket. That would wreak absolute havoc on the Franklin Line and buys us nothing that we couldn't have today already, but it's doable in the universe where xMU emphatically isn't rapid transit and can never, ever, ever be run like rapid transit. (Fortunately, I remain convinced that we don't live in that universe, and we can run this service like rapid transit without going full-bore Red Line.)
No, it can't. It is impossible. Move on.
Tunneling it into the Rail Link instead would also be more than doable (assuming we can ever get the damn thing built); if you still want to see 2 Rail Link tracks dedicated to rapid transit, here's one half of the ready-built rapid transit corridor utilizing the Link. The other half is probably Woburn.
No, it can't. Because you can't get HRT down the Fairmount corridor in Dorchester. And the existence of the Link does not automatically turn the commuter rail into a rapid transit system either; the same intermixing of disparate services on disparate headways happens below as above.
Move on.
And I'm fairly certain one of the promises and selling points of SS expansion is that it would enable the platforms to be segregated on the dispatching side in such a way that Fairmount could be given dedicated platforms and pushed out of the terminal on a clock-facing schedule without being disrupted by (or disrupting) the segregated NEC/Worcester tracks. If we can't dedicate Tracks 1-6 for the Worcester Line, 7-12 for the NEC, and 13/14 for Fairmount when expanded SS has 18+ tracks, then that's one of the only real reasons to focus on expanding it invalidated. A sizable portion of the existing problem is born out of existing peak hour operations on the NEC and to some extent on Worcester overwhelming and crowding out the limited track space available - partly because trains are forced to layover on the platform and partly because of the tremendous volume of NEC and Worcester traffic. Expanding yard capacity solves one of those problems just fine; if SS expansion doesn't solve the other then there's no reason to actually do it.
You're missing the point. SS expansion eliminates the platform conflicts. It lessens some of the entrypoint conflicts. It does not eliminate them all when the same lines have to share and cross over on the same lead tracks. Fairmount still crosses Southampton Yard and Widett Circle, and still has a platform spread on the Dot Ave. side that'll occasionally cross an Old Colony movement. The studies says 15 minutes is the best guarantee at 2030 volumes in the expanded station. They could push it a little further, but at cost of the headways being more variable and less consistent.
It is NOT rapid transit. Neither would it be rapid transit through the Link when it shares a 2-track tunnel with the Old Colony for nearly a mile and will have to cede a little bit of priority at the 4-track merge with the NEC for all the greater traffic coming through that tunnel.
If you think this is rapid transit or should be rapid transit, you misunderstand what this mode is.
