Reasonable Transit Pitches

Yah, it's just when I take the 515 Haverhill train I'd say 75% of the time it stops before Reading for an inbound train from Reading to get moving (and for the tracks to switch).

Double tracking Reading station would save a few mins for that and other trips. I did notice that there were platforms for both sides, so I think it would be fairly inexpensive to add a 2nd set of tracks to that station.
 
Perhaps the station building could be moved to one end of the platforms? That should be pretty doable, and would leave room for a full-high platform.
 
Perhaps the station building could be moved to one end of the platforms? That should be pretty doable, and would leave room for a full-high platform.

Nat'l Register of Historic Places could be a problem there depending on what do's/don'ts they specify. It's also a pretty sizeable building as B&M depots go, at about 850 sq. ft. so would not be a trivial matter to move. If it's movable, it doesn't need to go east or west on the block but merely back about 6 feet closer to Lincoln St. so there's enough room to stick the full-high and the ramps down to the building.

They might as well practice here, because if RER kicks the drive for systemwide full-highs into overdrive they're going to have some really tough platform retrofits in front of old depots:

Beverly Depot
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Beverly_Depot_(MBTA_station).jpg


Concord
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/MBTAconcord3.jpg


West Concord
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...oncord_station_facing_southwest,_May_2017.JPG

Swampscott (this one actually small enough that you might be able to jack the whole thing up off its foundation to the right height)
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-h7xJ7YTr...e-tLIQCLcB/s1600/MBTA+Swampscott+Platform.JPG

North Billerica
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...ilding_from_northbound_platform,_May_2016.JPG

Wellesley Farms
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...station,_south_and_west_sides,_April_2016.JPG
 
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They might as well practice here, because if RER kicks the drive for systemwide full-highs into overdrive they're going to have some really tough platform retrofits in front of old depots

Why not just lower the tracks a couple of feet instead of raiding the platform? It wouldn't be that expensive, unless there is a major culvert close by.
 
Canton Junction - which is larger and stone, and also on the NRHP - was moved around 2000 during electrification. House-sized wooden buildings like Reading, North Billerica, Swampscott, West Concord, and even Concord shouldn't be any sort of problem for professional building movers who do this every day.

Beverly will be trickier, though no worse than Canton Junction, and may be avoidable by realigning the tracks a bit anyway. There's also the possibility to drop the tracks a few feet (turning Pleasant into a ped-only passage) to do some grade crossing eliminations to the north.

Wellesley Farms is nothing but a shell anyway, and the B&A was once quad-tracked there, so that won't be too hard.
 
Why not just lower the tracks a couple of feet instead of raiding the platform? It wouldn't be that expensive, unless there is a major culvert close by.

Impossible at Reading because of the grade crossing sandwich. There's only 450 ft. on either side of the building to the adjacent streets, and the drop has to be nearly 4 feet to net a full-high.


Rail drop is likewise impossible for Concord (tighter crossing sandwich), West Concord (crossing + river bridge sandwich), Swampscott (rail bridge sandwich), Beverly Depot (adjacent rail bridge setting the floor), North Billerica (adjacent rail bridge setting the floor), and Beverly Farms (crossing sandwich). Unfortunately, that's the majority count of all the historically-protected ones still fronting a platform.
 
Canton Junction - which is larger and stone, and also on the NRHP - was moved around 2000 during electrification. House-sized wooden buildings like Reading, North Billerica, Swampscott, West Concord, and even Concord shouldn't be any sort of problem for professional building movers who do this every day.

Beverly will be trickier, though no worse than Canton Junction, and may be avoidable by realigning the tracks a bit anyway. There's also the possibility to drop the tracks a few feet (turning Pleasant into a ped-only passage) to do some grade crossing eliminations to the north.

Wellesley Farms is nothing but a shell anyway, and the B&A was once quad-tracked there, so that won't be too hard.


Wellesley Farms they'll probably just pack the tracks closer to close up the extremely wide spacing, then use the gained space to add ramps that don't impinge on the walking space in front of H. H. Richardson's stone hut.

Canton only affects the Stoughton inbound track. They can solve that one by dragging that Stoughton platform back south of the building running towards the Revere St. bridge and ramping-down in front of the Depot where the current mini-high does. It would be better accessibility than today where 350 ft. of platform is crammed down in the cut with no egress. They can cannibalize the ex- freight siding to the demolished rubber company to slightly straighten the Stoughton tracks before doing the platform job, and if they want to add a path egress to Revere St. in addition it's doubly good.


  • Sharon already has enough space in front of its depot to ramp-down in front of the building, and all Amtrak-led expansion to 3 & 4 tracks will push the outbound platform further out into the parking lot until the smaller disused southbound depot on the other side will almost be ready to be fronted by a platform.

  • Attleboro's twin houses are positioned at the ends of offset platforms...so easy ramp-down.

  • Needham Junction is single-track on a formerly 2-track roadbed...move the track out (it's not like RER service levels are ever coming to this spot).

  • Walpole doesn't work in its current location for any ADA'ing because of the short platform pinned in by the wye, and it can't serve Franklin and Foxboro traffic at the same time. The stop's probably got to move atop the Elm St. and Neponset River overpasses and run north the length of the parking lot, with bridge widened for an island full-high and freight passing track out of the freight yard...then a compacted wye track and crossovers so Foxboro trains can access either platform track.

  • Franklin (which is probably the butt-ugliest of the "historic" stations) has its platform spilling onto the deleted 2nd track berth. Hell, it looks like there might've been 3 tracks there at one point. Don't anticipate any problems here, but this is one that's indeed far enough from the nearest crossing or undergrade bridge that you could drop the railbed a full 4 feet and be fine.

  • Lincoln is easy...both platforms go facing on the north side of Lincoln Rd. and end the kooky boarding format with the split platforms.

  • Kendal Green is going to close anyway if they get on with building that 128 superstation.

That's it for the rest...since we don't need to care much about "faux"-historic depots like Mansfield (2004) or Shirley (1993). The real toughies all cluster to the Rockburyport, Fitchburg, and Reading Lines: Reading, Beverly, Concord, W. Concord, Swampscott, Bev Farms. And the moderate-toughie that splits the difference is North Billerica which can probably live within its means by shuffling around available ROW space, since it needs a freight passing track installation to be able to go full-high at all.
 
Have any studies been done that look at decreasing turn around times at North and South stations in order to effectively increase capacity (allowing more trains to be run during rush hour)?
 
Wellesley Farms they'll probably just pack the tracks closer to close up the extremely wide spacing, then use the gained space to add ramps that don't impinge on the walking space in front of H. H. Richardson's stone hut.

Would they really need to do that? The platform area is long enough that they don't have to go that far if they don't want to.

The hut is in rough shape by the way.
 
I thought the extra room at Wellesley Farms was planned for a passing siding eventually anyway?
 
Would they really need to do that? The platform area is long enough that they don't have to go that far if they don't want to.

The hut is in rough shape by the way.

WF is a 700 ft. platform. MBTA standard for new platform construction is 800 ft. (9 cars) unless absolutely positively physically impossible. So doing full-highs there will require finding 200 more feet for platform extensions. Worcester already runs some rush-hour sets of 7 cars, the absolute max that the current WF platforms will hold while opening all doors...so this is indeed a capacity necessity.

Problem is if you're doing the +100 ft. platform extension AND you try to play keep-away from the hut by moving the start of the platform south of the hut (add another 175+ ft.), you've got to do land prep pretty far down...after Hundreds Rd. bends away from the tracks and approaching where Squirrel Rd. bends towards the tracks. There's wetlands there and a culvert under the ROW from the spring that is the namesake of nearby Indian Springs Park. It's still generous space to work with overall, but given that the wetlands draw a pretty firm line on how far they can go they'll still be forced to work in some form or another in front of the historic hut. Playing keep-away probably isn't feasible here.
 
I thought the extra room at Wellesley Farms was planned for a passing siding eventually anyway?

The B&A was contiguous 4 tracks from Back Bay to Framingham until Pike construction in the early-60's reduced it to double inside of 128. The RR took that opportunity to re-signal the whole works, reduce the rest of the line to Framingham to double-track, and put some last-gasp investments in its passenger infrastructure by re-spacing the remaining tracks for roomier platforms. Wellesley has had conspicuously over-wide track spacing ever since. You can scroll on Google Maps from 128 to Natick and see that the spacing between the two tracks meanders tight and far with little rhyme or reason. And a lot of overhead bridges that are well off-center from the track centerline.
 
And chance of adding a third track and therefore some rush hour express trains for a possible Needham Green Line?

Extend the Orange down to West Roxbury and the Green to Needham. With that I think it would make sense to run some express trains to Longwood in order to speed things up.
 
Have any studies been done that look at decreasing turn around times at North and South stations in order to effectively increase capacity (allowing more trains to be run during rush hour)?

SSX does exactly that. Current South Station bottles up too many trains into laying over on-platform because of cross-cutting movements across switches, a result of the formerly symmetrical switch layout being chopped in half in the 60's when the station was partially demolished. And this gets worse by the year as NEC traffic increases, because as that new traffic fans out to the middle platforms they've cutting across switches that bottle up other trains on the platform. Further, every Amtrak trip has to make a pit stop to Southampton Yard for between-run chores, meaning the switches...which are already choked going towards the yards/Fairmount/etc. direction...have to get rationed for Amtrak priority. That leaves the T little ability to swap trainsets when, say, the A.M. rush-hour inbound that just arrived from Providence has 7 cars but the next reverse-commute outbound only needs 5. Capacity's wasted by the layover, and it's wasted by not being able to match train lengths with any sort of precision.

The primary thing...divorced from all the real-estate empire-building that's larded it up...that the SSX track work does is undo the pinch at the switches. That requires, as a necessity, more platforms...but it also means you can get on/off those platforms with fewer delays. And swap trains in/out of the yard more quickly for matching cars with passenger counts, meaning more cars available to plug elsewhere with headway increases. This gets easier still if a good chunk of the southside gets electrified with EMU's, which can mash together/pull apart in the yard on their own power instead of requiring a switcher. But regardless of electric vs. diesel, this is how you get the most possible service rotation out of the car fleet in an RER universe.


North Station's issues are simpler. Its switch layout is pretty straightforward, and since Boston Engine Terminal can be reached with relative ease and few conflicting moves from about 2/3 of the terminal the trainset swaps are less of a problem here (though it still gets hairy at rush). It's the drawbridges mostly. 10 tracks (+2 inactive) have to mash into 4 for the bridges, then re-spread into 7 (+1 inactive) on the Somerville side. Too many trains have to wait with a pinch like that. But since both draws are getting expanded to 3 tracks that'll do a lot to de-gunk the interlockings. 12 platform tracks just have to go to 6, with less sorting on the other side going back up to 8. Things will get a lot more fluid after those extra tracks come online.

Ultimately for full RER service you'll need Draw 3 re-added after the wrecking ball takes the old Spaulding building down. Let's say there's 18 platform tracks at that point just from filling out the remainder of the building, and on-ground reshuffling lengthens some of the too-short platforms there. Since there's room under the N. Bank bridge for 1 more track into Tower A, addition of an identical Draw 3 means there'd only have to be a mashing of 18 platform tracks into 9 lead tracks (easy...two sides of an island merging is the least-invasive part of terminal dispatching), and then the 9 leads would carry over all the way into Somerville making crossing over on/off the 4 mainlines much more academic.



In terms of how can you speed up changing ends...there is an upper limit there of about 10 minutes bare minimum, with allowances for cushion. And that's mostly regulatory with mandatory brake tests, trainlining tests, etc. making up the crew's between-runs. It doesn't get measurably easier with an xMU vs. loco-hauled train, either. And changing ends is much slower on a RR than on a rapid transit line because of the time chew of the regs. But unless they're habitually wasting an off-scale amount of time changing ends it's neither here nor there because that's life under the FRA and shouting at the moon like a transpo blogger isn't going to change that. If anything, having more level boarding platforms at the ends of lines makes it a lot easier for the engineer to jog from one cab to the other...for the same reason we riders need that accessibility to limit dwells.
 
And chance of adding a third track and therefore some rush hour express trains for a possible Needham Green Line?

Extend the Orange down to West Roxbury and the Green to Needham. With that I think it would make sense to run some express trains to Longwood in order to speed things up.

The D's way under-capacity as a branch, so tri-tracking isn't necessary there. Remember, it was built from Day 1 with the anticipation that the Needham Branch would be the very next build. Lifting the stupid speed restrictions out in Newton so trains could go 50 MPH again and cementing the vehicle-side performance with Type 10's that can accelerate in a zip would end up doing a lot to make that trip faster. As would their enhanced capacity for swallowing crowds at Fenway make the D go faster by keeping the individual cars less crowded at lower dwell times further out.

E-to-D connector may lend an assist here, too, even as a surface connector. Depends on how you run it. It can sweep up some extra riders out to Reservoir before terminating, or bend back towards Kenmore Loop.
 
E-to-D connector may lend an assist here, too, even as a surface connector. Depends on how you run it. It can sweep up some extra riders out to Reservoir before terminating, or bend back towards Kenmore Loop.

Sounds like this plan for an E-D surface connector that I put together. A few minor buildings in yellow would need to be removed.

32634248867_35da630015_b.jpg
 
Sounds like this plan for an E-D surface connector that I put together. A few minor buildings in yellow would need to be removed.

32634248867_35da630015_b.jpg


I was thinking even less invasive...just a street-running loop with curbside platforms and crossovers. No property takings required. Which end of the street you start looping down determines if you crossover D outbound or inbound to Kenmore Loop. Trimming some of the lane excess on 9 at the Brookline Ave. intersection can tame the traffic on the 3 blocks west of South Huntington.



Figure that pre-1985 the E ran rush hour Heath supplementals in addition to regular Arborway service. Utilizing this connector is the modern revival of those supplementals, and GLT will de-gunk Copley Jct. enough to allow it. Nothing grand headways-wise, just a booster for LMA the hours it's needed most.
 
Check your map. I think there is a new building in Brookline Place right in that path.
 
On the E Line, could you put the road on a diet and make the lane with trolley tracks a transit only lane?

Even better would be putting the trolley tracks at the edge of the road, then putting a curb so that people don't park or stop in the Trolley lane.

There's more than enough room if you get rid of some of the parking, or get rid of a lane of traffic.

If you had a trolley/bus lane, with something to separate it from regular traffic, that would be ideal.
 

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