Reasonable Transit Pitches

[Arlington]

^ i stand corrected--am I otherwise correct and is it just height above rails that thwarts Interoperability? (And length? Something like blue could run on orang but orange couldn't run on blue?)

 

[winstonoboogie]

^ i stand corrected--am I otherwise correct and is it just height above rails that thwarts Interoperability? (And length? Something like blue could run on orang but orange couldn't run on blue?)

Correct, floor height difference that could be accommodated by suspension mods. but more importantly, length would not allow Orange to run on Blue unless you went with an articulated design (which is a whole other can of worms). And its not just Bowdoin that triggers length, its the curve at State as well.

 

[tysmith95]

BTW...back to Salem for a sec. If you extended Blue to Mill St., total distance from Charles MGH is 15.5 miles, 2 miles less than Alewife-Braintree on Red. Total # of stations, depending on how many intermediates you end up with (factoring in Eastern Route vs. Point-of-Pines routings for reaching Lynn, and how many spacers you choose outbound), ranges from +/- 2 the current Orange Line's stop total.

You'd never fathom Mass General and frickin' Salem being the same transit trip as North Cambridge-Quincy, but it is! That's how car-imprisoned and transit-deprived the North Shore is compared to points south, and why the network effects of BL extension + un-strangling bus frequencies produce Braintree Branch-level ridership increases from Maverick on up.

The sad part about the North Shore is that even the car infrastructure is bad. There is no major freeway near cities like Lynn. Not saying that they should build one but the lack of infrastructure really hurts the economic development of these cities. The blue line would be relatively inexpensive and could really change the economic prospects of this area.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

The sad part about the North Shore is that even the car infrastructure is bad. There is no major freeway near cities like Lynn. Not saying that they should build one but the lack of infrastructure really hurts the economic development of these cities. The blue line would be relatively inexpensive and could really change the economic prospects of this area.

Not "relatively inexpensive". Getting to Lynn in the first place is scary-expensive because of the jump-across of ROW's, pick-your-poison of abutter density or wetlands when teeing up the jump-over in Revere, and cost of the water crossing. Easily a $B project. It has to be managed very well with none of that GLX contractor graft and lack-of-oversight to not end up a boondoggle and FCMB casualty. It most certainly can be done, but we've got a lot to learn about running a tight ship.

But it's big...so very very big and crucial...to touch down in Lynn. It's the revolution that fixes the entire northeast region bus network--Eastie, Chelsea, Revere, Lynn, Marblehead, Saugus--in a way that no amount of commuter rail service increases or Indigo service layer can touch. We have to be brave enough to take on that challenge, and manage it well.


Lynn-Salem is the one where you've got the wind to your back and the self-contained ROW with hardly any breaches of the property line to contend with. It beckons itself once you've exhaled on the truly hard work getting to Lynn. Then just look at the similarities in bus transfers, in end-of-line commuter rail branching at the last stop, population served, and distance between North Shore Blue and South Shore Red. Quincy + Braintree population = Lynn + Salem. Revere + Eastie = Dorchester (low estimate). It's a rough, not mirror, equivalency but you can project that...yes...go all the way to Salem and the gained ridership compares favorably with a Braintree Branch's worth of new gains and a Braintree Branch's worth of reverberation on the other critical Blue stops like Maverick.

Not to mention the cleanup effects on a branch-heavy CR line. Clean up the inner stops to a transfer node crowd and Newburyport/Rockport/Peabody starts resembling the Old Colony at hauling ass quickly to its branch splits and being able to trim all branch schedules to under an hour. Reach Salem in 20 instead of 32-33 minutes and both Newburyport and Rockport slide just under an hour, comparable to Middleboro and Plymouth. Peabody and the North Shore Mall parking sink (or +1'd next to the path further to West Peabody and US 1/Newburyport Turnpike) hits 30 mins, and is exactly where you want the 9-5'er car crush to be firewalled instead of slamming downtown Salem and Beverly. Bump the frequencies accordingly after said mainline cleanup and have the Chelsea grade crossing clusterfuck tamed to support higher speeds and the entire North Shore out to 495-land gets unshackled from its cars and awful car infrastructure. To point where you've got to seriously expand the very weak CARTA bus network (decent route coverage, nonexistently infrequent schedules) to provide truly useful last-mile connecting frequencies.

Network effects. You probably can't pick a corridor with more powerful coattails across a whole region's multi-modal network. From an outer neighborhood of Boston all the way to Cape Ann and the Merrimack River.

 

[BostonUrbEx]

I'm not sure Blue Line to Salem can use 6-car sets without screwing Eastie. Lynn should be workable. But Salem is going to be the straw that breaks the back and requires 8-car sets, I think.

Not to mention the cleanup effects on a branch-heavy CR line.

To add to your little list of snags, a couple of heavy hitters on the Rockburyport Line are the Salem Tunnel/Salem Station single track (essentially fucked over for a generation because of the new station) and Beverly Depot. The easy one to knock off, and this is a reasonable pitch all on its own, is a center high-level Beverly Depot which gives you much more flex in how to merge/split trains from two lines. Slap that high level right down on the No. 1 track and outbound platform, and bump the No. 1 track out to the parking spaces. Park St is absurdly wide and you can bump the parking back just fine without losing any. An elevator at the Pleasant St end will have: G - Pleasant St, 1 - Platform, and 2 - Garage. The historic depot is not impacted at all, and the present-day inbound platform will have a low fence down the tactile strip to note is not to be used but to preserve the platform and depot feel still.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I'm not sure Blue Line to Salem can use 6-car sets without screwing Eastie. Lynn should be workable. But Salem is going to be the straw that breaks the back and requires 8-car sets, I think.

No, it wouldn't. Distance is a little shorter than Red, # of stations equal to Orange, and the downtown transfers much less congested than either. It'll still be the smallest ridership color line. Just by much smaller margin, and with headways much more similar to the others.

To add to your little list of snags, a couple of heavy hitters on the Rockburyport Line are the Salem Tunnel/Salem Station single track (essentially fucked over for a generation because of the new station) and Beverly Depot. The easy one to knock off, and this is a reasonable pitch all on its own, is a center high-level Beverly Depot which gives you much more flex in how to merge/split trains from two lines. Slap that high level right down on the No. 1 track and outbound platform, and bump the No. 1 track out to the parking spaces. Park St is absurdly wide and you can bump the parking back just fine without losing any. An elevator at the Pleasant St end will have: G - Pleasant St, 1 - Platform, and 2 - Garage. The historic depot is not impacted at all, and the present-day inbound platform will have a low fence down the tactile strip to note is not to be used but to preserve the platform and depot feel still.

Since Blue can't go through the tunnel Salem CR has to be moved back south-of-portal if you want a rapid transit superstation. That was a 2-track station; the switch to single used to be couple hundred feet inside the portal instead of outside. Just need to ADA the pit and connect it to the Blue station upstairs. The parking sink station is much worse-located, worse for tunnel traffic mgt., and the garage is anachronistic already. Expediency for moving the station in '88 was that it was way cheaper to make accessible than retrofitting the pit. It's not the better location, and town will live to regret the parking sink like Quincy did the Quincy Ctr. garage.

Beverly isn't a hard mod; historic depots have full-highs installed in front all over the East Coast. It's careful, and thus pricier work but not at all torturous or unusual. There's no blockers here.

 

[BostonUrbEx]

I understand Blue Line would still have the lowest ridership, but the other lines extend either direction from downtown. Half their ridership comes from one side of the city, and half comes from the other side. But the Blue Line's entire ridership would be coming from just one area. I can very easily be convinced that 6-car sets are adequate, I would just be very surprised to hear that.


Great point on moving Salem back to the old location. I'm not sure why I never thought of this in all my hamfisted transit fantasies. The old location looks like it was a much better location. There's no pressing need to keep the current one unless we're on a parking sink binge and bow to parking. It seems the default I've always come across is to have the Blue Line terminate at a transfer South Salem station near Salem State. The old location really is superior in so many ways, though. When can we realistically expect that, though? I mean, all that money was just pissed away on the current station.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I understand Blue Line would still have the lowest ridership, but the other lines extend either direction from downtown. Half their ridership comes from one side of the city, and half comes from the other side. But the Blue Line's entire ridership would be coming from just one area. I can very easily be convinced that 6-car sets are adequate, I would just be very surprised to hear that.


Great point on moving Salem back to the old location. I'm not sure why I never thought of this in all my hamfisted transit fantasies. The old location looks like it was a much better location. There's no pressing need to keep the current one unless we're on a parking sink binge and bow to parking. It seems the default I've always come across is to have the Blue Line terminate at a transfer South Salem station near Salem State. The old location really is superior in so many ways, though. When can we realistically expect that, though? I mean, all that money was just pissed away on the current station.

Blue is so Eastie-centric that Maverick is the ridership center of the line. It's very different from the other 3 in that regard. State St.'s Blue Book boardings are 4993 Blue vs. 8265 Orange; GC's are 2835 Blue vs. 7993 Green. Charles MGH figures to have similar 70/30 split between Red and Blue. Daily line transfers also have an asynchronous skew that consistently favors the higher-ridership line over the lower-ridership line every time. GC has 14,156 Blue-to-Green transfers vs. 13,527 Green-to-Blue, State 9572 Blue-to-Orange transfers vs. 9080 Orange-to-Blue.

Obviously Blue has significant room to grow downtown with expansion to Charles and to Lynn, general growth in Eastie and Revere, and Yellow Line network growth as the North Shore bus network gets its perma-fixes for exponential service increases. But it's not like the other 3 color lines are standing still; the whole reason we're pants-shitting scared of downtown mobility grinding to a halt is because Red/Orange/Green figure to keep growing so explosively. Ridership shares are probably going to track in tandem. And the highest-ridership Blue stop is going to continue to be Maverick fueled by the untangling and subsequent explosion of those five heavy-ridership Eastie/Revere/Chelsea bus routes once Lynn terminal's equipment drain gets fixed by the Blue extension. As previously noted, Maverick increases could equal Lynn/Central Sq.'s all-new ridership contributions just from Lynn perma-fixing the Eastie bus equipment distribution.

For these reasons you'll likely never hit a point where crowding is so unbalanced that dwells start to become a serious problem before ever crossing the Harbor, because the point of maximum overchurn centers on Maverick instead of the Big 4 downtown transfers like the other 3 color lines. Hell, if you even wanted to go wholest-hog and extend the line west from Charles to Kenmore with +2 more intermediates it still wouldn't change the overchurn point or put any stress whatsoever on what a 6-car train can hold if headways were improved to Orange-ish levels. And a Kenmore-Salem line would still be a half-mile shorter than Red Alewife-Braintree, with fewer stations than a post-GLX D Line schedule will cover in a few years between Riverside and Lechmere (nevermind all the extension stops on top of that).

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That whole "get to Lynn first" struggle unfortunately puts Salem completely off any planning clock until Lynn is a go. There's no Step 2 without a Step 1...and no Step 1 without the very much non-optional in any universe Step 0 of doing Red-Blue. There's a whole lot of heads that have to get un-buried from sand before a priority as high as Lynn can get back in the planning real world. The great retreat from taking critical projects like Red-Blue and Silver Line Phase III restarts off the TIP was a hugely costly momentum-killer.

Realistic chances are that the Salem garage is going to be nearing the age Quincy Ctr. garage got when people started becoming sick of it before there's an actual bite at the apple to do it right and properly urban at a downtown multimodal superstation.

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In the meantime we'll have to go through the *minor* stupidity in 8 years of jackhammering up the southerly 50 ft. of brand new Salem platform and re-pouring that lost 50 ft. at the north end to undo the design mistake of blocking a 2-track switch out of the portal. Then they can finally move some hillside dirt, do a facing platform that increases frequencies, and solve the tunnel traffic management enough that widening the tunnel probably won't ever be necessary (esp. if the South Salem/SSU infill provides complementary south-of-portal throttle for staging delay-free tunnel slips). Not expensive to mod, and they didn't salt the earth in any devastating way...but it's another annoying reminder of how the parkingparkingparking tunnel vision on that soon-to-be white elephant led to pants-on-head project mgt. stupidity.

Then they'll have to sharply increase service levels on the Newburyport Branch to let North Beverly--the station that actually is directly at a Route 128 exit--play goalie for some of that unnecessary longer-distance P&R traffic that's slamming the dense Salem & Beverly downtowns. Depressingly, the '04 North Shore Transit Improvements Study was on top of all of this...and just got thrown in the trash. The study specced installation of two more double-track passing sidings in Ipswich and Rowley, renovation of N. Bev., and increasing rush-hour frequencies on the branch. Expanding the tiny 87-space lot at N. Bev is going to be the town's problem for lack of expansion space, but the sprawled-out big box mall that runs behind the full length of the station on the Route 1A side offers plenty of options if the public-private players are willing.

Then of course everyone up here still badly wants the Peabody Branch, even if it's just a Peabody Sq. placeholder that clinches the eventual Phase II to North Shore Mall as a later inevitability. That does even more for the car crush in downtown Salem and still would function as a critical 9-5'er/P&R'er load diversion when the Blue Line comes to town. Distance and local bus coverage to Salem is comparable to Holbrook-Randolph and South Weymouth to the Red + branch splits @ Braintree, so Peabody would retain most of its native CR demand without excessive Blue cannibalization.

 

[BostonUrbEx]

The study specced installation of two more double-track passing sidings in Ipswich and Rowley

You linked to the same siding twice. That siding also seems a bit sketchy for meets. It is definitely not for rolling meets. It is more like whoever is taking the hole is going to stop for a minute or two (assuming no delays turning it into 5 or 10 minutes). I'd like to see the double track between Port and Knight interlockings (up in Newburyport) extended down to Red Gate Rd. Signal spacing currently supports this. Also, upgrade the Ipswich siding between Bagley and Ipswich West, which is currently not mainline track. Remove Ipswich West and extend the siding to pretty much anywhere short of Asbury St in Hamilton/Wenham. There's nothing really in the way, and I don't think there's any signaled crossings, just private asphalt patches.


In regards to Peabody Branch, which I think is one of the most important Eastern Route improvements, this is going to be not-so-ideal with the new Salem Station designed the way it is. That is going to be a very tight curve on the high-level, and sub-500', let alone sub-800'. Plus a very awkward crossing at the west of the platform. It would be better to design the Peabody Branch with Salem relocated back to the south portal.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

You linked to the same siding twice. That siding also seems a bit sketchy for meets. It is definitely not for rolling meets. It is more like whoever is taking the hole is going to stop for a minute or two (assuming no delays turning it into 5 or 10 minutes). I'd like to see the double track between Port and Knight interlockings (up in Newburyport) extended down to Red Gate Rd. Signal spacing currently supports this. Also, upgrade the Ipswich siding between Bagley and Ipswich West, which is currently not mainline track. Remove Ipswich West and extend the siding to pretty much anywhere short of Asbury St in Hamilton/Wenham. There's nothing really in the way, and I don't think there's any signaled crossings, just private asphalt patches.


In regards to Peabody Branch, which I think is one of the most important Eastern Route improvements, this is going to be not-so-ideal with the new Salem Station designed the way it is. That is going to be a very tight curve on the high-level, and sub-500', let alone sub-800'. Plus a very awkward crossing at the west of the platform. It would be better to design the Peabody Branch with Salem relocated back to the south portal.

My bad on the CTRL-C; this was the Rowley siding: http://mbta.com/uploadedFiles/Documents/North_Shore_Transit_Improvements/Figure_3_3_RowleySiding.pdf.

I wouldn't read too much into the siding locations, as they were based on approximates that absolute-minimized wetlands, noise, etc. impacts for the study rather than precise traffic modeling. The Rowley one in particular can go anywhere because the '98 Newburyport extension refurbed every double-track bridge and culvert north of Ipswich, set the single track on the outbound berth instead of centering it, set all signal cabinets and line structures in a double-track configuration, and re-graded the empty inbound berth (hard to tell today on Google because of vegetation, but it's fully graded the whole distance and only needs new ballast poured on top).



Yes, Salem is less-than-awesomely configured for Peabody service. But the project managers did keep all their promises to not fuck up the easement, so the North Shore Study plan for a 450 ft. (5 car) side platform on a slight curve is still in-effect. And it looks like they designed the little hook at the end of the driveway with a near-90 degree angle grade crossing in mind and optimized sightlines. May need a staffed crossing tender here, but since it's a staffed garage that already probably has a small permanent Keolis office room the on-duty tender could remote-control it via security cam from inside the building.



Like it or not, the white elephant garage is going to have to run its course. Blue Line is probably the only opportunity that will present itself for moving the station back south-of-portal, since obviously a 6-block hike is unacceptable for tying together 2 modes that need to be transferrable and the tunnel's only wide enough to bring 1 mode north. That's the no-brainest of no-brainers to forfeit the garage and move the CR platforms back south when Blue comes to town. But how many decades is that going to take when the state is still deer-in-headlights over Red-Blue and keeps pretending Seth Moulton didn't say what he keeps loudly saying about BLX-Lynn?

It's not as if the north-of-portal station is inconveniently located or poorly conceived in absolute terms. It's very walkable from all around, even if the old one was a splitting-hairs difference +1 more walkable. For the commuter rail of 1988 it was enormously easier to swap portals and work on empty land to get an accessible station rather than do back-breaking renovations to bring ramps or elevators deep inside the pit. Those still-extant staircases from Mill St. were very very steep. And it's not like double-tracking the platforms at the current station is impossible. The contractors made a 50 ft. brainfart with their platform concrete pour. All it takes is 50 ft. of jackhammering, and another 50 ft. of compensatory concrete pouring at the north tip to rectify the mistake and reserve the track switch for when they scoop out dirt along the embankment and build the facing outbound platform. It's plenty fine for serving Salem's needs until the next big thing in Blue comes along however many generations in the future.

This and Beverly's garage were born of a lot of political perversion. They were the warped outcomes of CLF Transit Commitments that through time turned into asphalt empire-building schemes and bait-and-switch for delaying/scuttling Commitments (like GLX) closer to Boston. It wouldn't have mutated to this unsatisfying and unsustainable end if bad actors hadn't spent 25 years acting bad about those Commitments. That wasn't Salem-North's location's fault. It wasn't necessarily because Salem locals had a totally wrongheaded advocacy. It was rancid statewide Masshole politics doing what it always does unconsciously and without any self-perception of the long-term consequences. The white elephant is more a symbol of why we can't have nice things here than some sort of singular menace to its immediate surroundings.

 

[whighlander]

The tunnel ends in the middle of Thorndike Field just on the other side of Route 2 at this emergency exit shaft: https://goo.gl/maps/QgnnnA4gV2z. It'd take 1.2 miles of shallow cut-and-cover under the Minuteman--same type of construction as the Davis-Alewife segment under the Somerville Community Path--to reach an Arlington Center station. Tunnel would then have to extend 2000 ft. beyond AC to a portal behind the high school about 400 ft. past Mill St. The entire length of the tunnel dig the Minuteman would be restored on-top to its original appearance after construction.

You'd need to build all of the tunnel to the portal even if Arlington Center is the only station, simply because that's the equivalent length of tail track storage inside the tunnel as what currently exists at Alewife. If you're not going to Heights, the portal can just be fenced off as the emergency exit instead of shafting an egress straight up like in Thorndike Field. It would operate with 2 storage tail tracks behind the station, balanced with the #3 center pocket track between Alewife and Thorndike Field. Very tight storage margins, but doable at no-harm for a +1 extension.


It'd obviously be better to go the extra 1.3 miles on the surface beyond the portal to Arlington Heights and get a proper-size layover yard akin to Codman @ Ashmont behind the bus depot on the lumber yard property. For the most part the ROW is tree-buffered well enough that the Minuteman can be accommodated to the side unbroken. But it can only be done as a surface route because of adjacent Mill Brook. Won't be totally out-of-sight/out-of-mind like the tunneled Alewife-AC extension under the Minuteman. I guess if you want to sell that on a somewhat more willing 21st century Arlington it's best to play it close to vest one station at a time: the AC tunnel build to the portal w/ tail-track storage as the minimum fallback. And if there's no palpable anxiety, gently try to sell them on AH with the more robust permanent storage if that succeeds at not stirring up a hornet's nest.

F-Line all that sounded interesting until you got to Mill Brook

A few years ago a lot of the Minuteman Bike / Pedestrian path was dug up to put in major MWRA pipes running along Mill Brook -- moving large sewer lines such as the Mill Brook Vallley Relief Sewer is very [as in Big Dig] expensive
http://arlingtonma.virtualtownhall.net/Public_Documents/ArlingtonMA_WebDocs/MWRA/MWRA2006-Laskey.pdf

 

[George_Apley]

Seeing that the Wachusett stop is almost ready on Fitchburg... would it ever make sense to extend to Gardner? I noticed the ROW gets rather loopy after Wachusett...

 

[BostonUrbEx]

And that is precisely why Gardner will never make economic or ridership sense. The purpose of Wachusett was to serve Gardner (via Rt 2 Park & Ride catchment) while still being time competitive with car for the rest of the way into Boston. Carving out a 2 mile tunnel will never be justified on this route, and thus you'll probably never see service beyond this point.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Ashburnham horseshoe is an absolute schedule-murderer and a major freight choke point because the freights are slowed by the topography as well. The curvature and steep grade were big reasons why Gardner had such anemic ridership the first time around. It was virtually an Amtrak schedule to get out there in a commuter rail coach.

Wachusett's opening comes with amped-up Gardner bus frequencies in-tow, so the project directly addresses Gardner transit to very substantial degree. That's why this was such a critical recipient of fed grant money; economic justice for Gardner was one of the key value propositions behind the pitch. Combo of the new stop making same-or-better schedule time with the end-to-end mainline speed increases, train schedule increases, and decent bus frequencies on a straight shot down a relatively uncongested stretch of Route 2 make for a best-of-all-worlds solution. Bus transfer via Route 2 will always, always beat a one-seat train schedule on the horseshoe, and that's why the Fitchburg Line will never ever be extended again.

This will get especially good when there's some reverse-peak infills on the schedule serving the fast-growing Devens high-tech job market. Fitchburg-proper is also projected to have a lot of job growth itself, since the relatively cheap and plentiful real estate there + big transit investment is getting looks from New Hampshire companies along the Capitol Corridor who are growing sick of the absolutely abysmal attention to infrastructure and material-support stimuli up there. Passive tax breaks passed out like candy just don't impress like they used to, so companies are starting to casually size up the nearest south-of-border density pockets...Lowell the closer fit, Fitchburg the cheaper fit.

 

[WormtownNative]

The same line that has the Hoosac tunnel has that horseshoe? Doesn't make sense why they didn't build a much shorter tunnel instead of that.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

The same line that has the Hoosac tunnel has that horseshoe? Doesn't make sense why they didn't build a much shorter tunnel instead of that.

A question with a very good answer: the Fitchburg RR's Boston-Montreal mainline route used to split off at the very tip of the horseshoe, running to Keene, NH and Bellows Falls, VT before joining up with the current Vermonter route at Bellows Falls station the rest of the way to Montpelier, St. Albans, and Montreal. So they had very good reason to go around the hill instead of through it. You can see the junction in the photo shooting straight off the top of the horseshoe and continuing through the tree line separating buildings, while the Fitchburg Main pulls away at maximum curvature. Google shows 3-decades-abandoned tracks still in the ground on the other side of the Route 101 grade crossing.

That branch stopped being a load-bearing mainline route to Montreal after Boston & Maine took over the Fitchburg in 1900 and consolidated intercity trains on its own routes. North Station to Bellows Falls passenger service ended 1958, abandoned north of Winchendon 1970, abandoned Ashburnham-Winchendon 1984. It's currently trailed from the NH side of the state line on Route 12 to Walpole, NH...about a half-mile shy from the Connecticut River and 4 miles from the nearest road bridge into VT. Then an isolated 2.5 mile chunk in MA in downtown Winchendon. Rest of the ROW was purchased by towns of Ashburnham and Winchendon from Pan Am years ago for completing the trail, but for whatever reason they've been real slow on the uptake and haven't made much progress.


They're not going to spend a kajillion dollars blasting through that hill today when freight isn't overly time-sensitive, the Gardner-Wachusett bus still handily beats a direct train through all the other very un-straight squiggles on the ROW, and anywhere past Gardner like Templeton and Athol is simply a world removed from the Boston commuter market.

 

[The EGE]

Interestingly, the junction has changed over the years. The Vermont and Massachusetts (black lines) was completed in the 1840s; the route was so steep that there was a switchback with a sharp curve to run the engine around the train. The V&M was originally partially completed on a route running through Winchendon rather than Gardner; the Cheshire (dark red) bought and finished it. After the Hoosac Tunnel opened in 1875, there was more westward through traffic, and the curve was opened in 1877.

Passenger service on the Ashburnham Branch (dark blue) began in 1874 and ended in 1924.

 

[Scalziand]

A tunnel wouldn't be very short though. Any length that's cut off the hairpin is going to end up having to be tunneled anyway. There's a maximum of about 3mi that could be cut out of that hairpin, but it would require a 3mi tunnel. The line needs to be that long to climb the grade over the summit to get into Gardner. It can't be any shorter than that 3mi reduction.

Here's the grade in the vicinity of the curve.

If you just tried cutting across the base of the curve, there's a 200 ft difference in grade, but only enough room to gain 50ft of elevation at the established grade. We're not talking HSR that can handle 3-4%, but freight that should be kept around ~1%, maybe ~2%

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

June 1956 B&M timetable. Yes, there was North Station-Greenfield commuter rail service in addition to Springfield-Greenfield commuter rail service on the Conn River Line.

A Fitchburg all-stops local today runs about 1:30; super-expresses running non-stop Porter-South Acton do Fitchburg in 7 stops at ~1:10. Slightly faster than the limited-stop schedule in '56, thanks to the total absence of freights inbound of Ayer. The daytime slots in '56 did the 4 extra stops past Fitchburg to Greenfield in +1:18-1:45. In all likelihood freights were the source of such extreme variability.

Springfield-Greenfield '56 is about 5-8 minutes faster than the Vermonter 2016 schedule despite making more local stops. Curse the excessive padding in the Vermonter schedule for all the ongoing Springfield Line and New Haven Line heavy construction, but that should snap back to roughly par within 18-24 months.


Now compare schedules with the Boston-Montreal Amtrak study benchmarks for Boston-Greenfield schedule on the L-shaped B&A + Conn River routing via Worcester and Springfield. This is the 'middle'-build Alternative with no segments of track upgraded to any greater than 79 MPH.

• North Station-Fitchburg-Greenfield (Fitchburg '16 super-express + Fitchburg-Greenfield '56 local): ~2:20-2:45 for 11 stops. No layovers.

• South Station-Springfield-Greenfield (2035): ~3:15-3:25 for 10 stops. ~15-25 min. layovers in Springfield for connecting Springfield Line trains.

Apples-oranges because the connections layover @ Springfield is a feature not a bug. But if you're going on raw transit time it's all of 15-40 minute advantage for the Fitchburg Line to Greenfield vs. the L-shape. Start subtracting from there if the B&A and Conn River got their max-build "Alternative 3" speed increases to 90 MPH Palmer-Springfield and Hatfield-Deerfield. If that doesn't knock it to outright par and you're hankering for a fight with basic geography, the B&A can knock many more degrees off many more curves than the Fitchburg which never lets the twisting banks of the Millers River out of its sight between Gardner and Greenfield.

The "Big L" on the B&A will always...always...be the fastest route to any point in Western MA in terms of absolute performance ceiling. That's true even before you get to the little matter of population densities outside of Route 128: Worcester (pop. 183K) + Springfield (pop. 153K) + Framingham (68K) >>> Fitchburg (40K) + Leominster (40K) + Acton (22K). Fitchburg's a great freight mainline, and Norfolk Southern's got 9 figures worth of investment plans for it. But that's its only practical use out in the Route 2 hinterlands: move shitloads of freight though the sticks so it's not clogging up the passenger lines that hit the cities.

 

[BostonUrbEx]

If you just tried cutting across the base of the curve, there's a 200 ft difference in grade, but only enough room to gain 50ft of elevation at the established grade. We're not talking HSR that can handle 3-4%, but freight that should be kept around ~1%, maybe ~2%

The solid 1% grade for 10+ miles is already too taxing on the freights. I had many a stalled train that I had to deal with. 2% would be brutal, Pan Am is not equipped to handle it. They'd have to have extra locomotives and crews set aside just to make assists.